


strewn among the blood-bright stars

by Val Mora (valmora)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, M/M, Political Intrigue, implied Terezi♦Dave, liberties taken everywhere, many OCs - Freeform, very minor references to trans characters having a bad time of being in the us, worldfusion au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 10:16:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2648348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux, setting up an apiary network on a university campus, meets a troll who isn't from Alternia. Romance, and politics, blossom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part ii

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buffdaddy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buffdaddy/gifts).



> This fic is based on [an illustration by buffdaddy](http://buffdaddyjohn.tumblr.com/post/39811458046). Three years ago, I asked anonymously if it was okay to write a fic based on it, and received a positive response, so I started writing. I kind of got carried away, lost track of time, etc, but I think it's finally done.
> 
> I’ve drawn Eridan’s blood color up a little higher than it is in canon, from 660066 to 660033 (where the Condesce is 990066).
> 
> There is a scene in which Sollux displays some unfortunate attitudes towards condom usage that in this context, are intended to make sense from the standpoint of Alternian society. Eridan’s standpoint is, of course, intended to make sense from the standpoint of a 21st century American who’s had reasonable sex ed.
> 
> On linguistics: Alternian as portrayed in this fic is agglutinative, SVO, and syntax-based rather than with declension or case markers. It lacks grammatical gender. It is, however, highly suffused with “honorific” and “humble” language associated with rank and blood color. It is written using an alphabetic system known as the “ayembedt” and is mostly phonetic, in the same sense as English is “mostly phonetic.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck, this map isn’t to scale, and the light is starting to get to him, even if it’s dimmer than Alternian daylight but seriously trolls are meant to be nocturnal.

There, ten feet away, walking towards him, the vivid orange-lemon brightness of horns, on a face made for a financiavenger beneath the sunglasses. Black jeans, green t-shirt, floppy green hat. Not so high on the hemospectrum that he’ll spit on Sollux, easy enough in himself that he might know the area.

“Excuse me,” Sollux says, using the carefully formal tones of a warmblood to a coldblood, just for the politeness – that shade of green doesn’t really merit it, but it’s better to be polite to a stranger – “do you know which way is Erie Street?”

The guy’s lips move, faintly, and then he says, in the _worst_ accent Sollux has ever heard, “Don’t speak Alternian.” It’s – it’s like he’s never heard another troll speak.

“The _fuck_ ,” Sollux spits, taking a half-step back. “How are you a troll and you don’t speak –”

The guy takes off the hat. There are headphones over his aural –

Fuck. Aural _fins_. Fucking – violet at _lowest_ , look at the blood shading, how is he even -

“Do you speak English?” the seadweller says, accentless English, slow and movie-perfect.

“Yeah,” Sollux says, too shocked for anything else.

“I don’t speak Alternian,” the guy repeats, this time in English. “Can I help you?”

Sollux just breathes a moment. Stares at the guy’s face, expressionless from the sunglasses. Frills gone bright purple with heat. He must’ve been covering them up. Wearing _green_ , a whole half-spectrum lower than his blood color, no Alternian language.

“I’m looking for 57th Street,” he says finally.

“You’re way too far north, and heading more north,” the guy says. “You should probably take a bus or the train.”

“How far is it?”

The corner of his mouth twitches up. “Far-ish. How long do you have?”

Right, okay, fucked. “Thanks.”

“I’m going that way anyway,” the guy says awkwardly, “if you want to come with.”

...in all honesty, he wants to find out what the fuck is wrong with this guy, but that would be rude.

“Sure,” he says.

The guy starts walking, so Sollux falls in beside him, as they get to a set of stairs and take them down, below the sidewalk.

“What brings you here?” He doesn’t say _to Earth_ , which Sollux appreciates on a political-correctness level, including the fact that Fishboy here clearly has been on Earth for a lot longer than normal.

“I’m helping the university retrofit a few blo- _rooms_ into apiculture facilities.”

Fishboy takes two steps beside him, then says, “Apiculture?”

“Beekeeping.”

Another pause. “I didn’t think the university had a farming program.”

“If they do it’s none of my beeswax.” He swallows the _fuckface_ that wants to emerge after that, because he at least knows how to interact with other people.

The guy snickers. “So if you’re not a beekeeper, what are you?”

Sollux almost reaches to his neck to pull out his bug tags, stamped with the glittering gold-and-violet insignia of the Apialienators, but cuts the gesture short and says, “Technician.”

“Oh!” Fishface turns his head, looks Sollux up and down. “Should have known you were military, but the English threw me. Computer networks using bees, right?”

 _How can you be a troll and not know that,_ Sollux doesn’t say. “Yeah.”

“That’s cool. This might be a stupid question, but do you get stung a lot?”

 _Yes, it’s stupid._ “They die if they sting, so they try not to, and we’re trained in how not to make them want to.”

“Are they different from Earth bees?”

“Significantly.”

Fishface grins. His fangs are in even rows, worse than the most inoffensive warmblood. It’s pretty fucking unreal, violet-shaded fins and a mouth full of gentle teeth.

To keep himself from looking too hard, Sollux looks at the signs ahead of them.

“Do you have money for a ticket?” Fishface asks.

“What is this?”

“Train station. Here.” Fishface shows him a machine, and looks away while Sollux buys a ticket. They go out on the platform.

“Eridan,” Fishface says after a moment of staring at the tracks.

“What?”

“Eridan. My name.”

He doesn’t even say it right. ɛəɹədæn, like an American. 

“Sollux,” Sollux cuts the lisp on his name as best he can, but it still comes out hissing. The English _s_ is a different phoneme that he has no difficulty with, but he still has trouble with the Alternian version. _x_ for _ç_. Obvious, spittingly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of the language.

“Khollux?”

He gives up. “Sollux,” he says, like an English speaker.

Eridan says it again, this time with at least something approximating the right consonant to start it.

“You live around here?” Sollux asks, since it’s polite.

Eridan’s half-smiling. “Yeah.”

“What do you do?”

“Student.” The tracks begin to rattle, a screaming metal noise. “Here comes the train.”

“Okay. Thanks for the directions.”

“No problem.” They both walk into the mass-transit wheeled device, but take different seats, and say no more to each other until they both get off at the same stop.

Outside the mass-transit wheeled device, at the exit, Eridan catches up to him, then says, “Wait a sec,” reaching into the bag slung over his shoulder.

Sollux doesn’t let himself tense up, but he does rest two fingers on the frame of his glasses, at least until Eridan pulls a notebook and pen out of his bag. 

“Look, um, I don’t know how long you’ll be in town, but if you need to see an alien face, if you can handle my not being alien enough to fix homesickness, or if you just want coffee, you can call me. Here’s my number.” He tears the sheet out and offers it.

Sollux stares at his hand for a moment.

“You know that you’re –” he starts, and Eridan’s mouth goes tight, so Sollux amends it to, “I’ll be here a couple of months.” Takes the slip of paper.

“Cool.” Eridan shoves his glasses up to rub at one eye, and Sollux looks down at the number.

 _Eridan Ampora_ , it says in smooth Roman letters. _872-555-1133. ampora@-----.edu_

“Do you have a blood sign?” he asks.

“No,” Eridan says flatly, then smoothes out his voice and says, “Call if you need anything.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Sollux folds the piece of paper over, shoves it in his pocket. “I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah.” 

Sollux turns, walks away, doesn’t look back.

 

 

 

The server blocks are dark. He imagines them filled with comb-frames, the bees flitting about to rest on verdant bioluminescent flowers. The blocks are too small; they will stifle the bees.

Part of the reason for this exercise was to see how using Earth flowers would change the bees’ networks, but the filtered air is stale; the bees will know they aren’t outside. The flowers are doing fine, he supposes.

He goes outside of the room to where the light switches are, the human tech following behind. “Have you checked the spectrum of light and compared it to actual specs on Alternian daytime?”

“Yes, of course,” the tech says. 

“Good.” Sollux doesn’t want to test it; he likes not having a sunburn, and also his vision.

 

 

There’s a database on the Interweb that lists every single sign available for all blood colors; he sets it right to seadwellers. It’s a lot smaller at that end, with only a few hundred signs. Most of them are taken; seadwellers get possessive of their signs. They don’t like others to claim them. 

He keeps going up the hemospectrum, from the violet of the coastal types to the bright purples of the open-ocean dwellers, and, finally, near the top, a dark almost-tyrian, the double-jags that look too much like Eridan’s horns to be a coincidence, _Orphaner Dualscar,_ the Pretender, officially unclaimed.

Sollux scrolls past, loads the previous page of purples to hide what he was looking at, and then logs off.

 

 

A week after he arrives, he wanders into a bookstore on the university campus, sees the jagged brightness of troll horns in the back. Could be an interworld student, but unlikely.

Today Eridan’s wearing a dark purple scarf that covers the gills at his throat, and headphones that break up the lines of his aural fins.

“Yo,” Sollux says. Eridan jumps, shoulders caving protectively as he turns. When he sees Sollux, he relaxes, face easing into something like a smile.

“Hi.” 

Martial history. _Earth_ martial history. Blood will out.

“What’re you reading?” Like he doesn’t know.

“Just browsing,” Eridan says, reaching up to scratch at the base of one horn, _what the flying flipping fuck._ “I’m studying the interaction of technology and entertainment in popular consumption, so I find stories about the high seas enjoyable.”

Wait, what? “Huh?”

“I study internet piracy, so I read about sea pirates for fun.” 

That’s really fucking bizarre.

“Internet piracy.”

“Yeah.” Eridan turns, half-smiling at him. “Like when you want to listen to a song, but you don’t want to pay for it, so you download it off the internet.”

Sollux has a good memory for shades of purple; with his sunglasses perched on top of his head, Eridan’s eyes, fully colored-in, are vividly and utterly as close to tyrian as Dualscar’s shade.

“I see.”

“Alternia did have sea pirates, right?” 

He’s not sure whether Eridan is teasing him or not.

“They were called Gamblignants.” And Dualscar the leader of the Corsairadicators before he turned to treason. 

“How’s the setup for the bee computers going?”

“It’s fine.” 

An awkward pause where they look at each other, and then Eridan’s chin drops, horns coming up, and Sollux takes a step back – _warm and soft, cold and cruel_ , the wiggler rhyme croons in his head – and then Eridan says, voice quiet, “Um, do you want to get coffee?”

“What?”

Eridan looks back up, horns drawing away again, and Sollux realizes, dully, that Eridan uses human body language, of all the sick things. That was submission, that little head drop, not horn-baring aggression.

His face has fallen, though. “Not right now, I guess?”

“No, it’s fine,” _I thought you would move like a troll, excuse my mistake_. “I misheard you for a moment. Sounds good.”

There’s a little coffee shop across the street, so they go there and sit down at one of the tiny tipsy brushed-steel tables along the windows. It’s beneath the mass transit vehicle tracks, so when one passes overhead, the air vibrates in his thorax like a reverse chirrup.

“So you’re a bee computer tech,” Eridan says, after the first sip of his drink, his smile half-hidden and warm. “How’d you get involved in that?”

“I’ve always liked computers and programming. Apiocomputing’s strength isn’t speed, it’s flexibility. Any dumb silicon and gold system can follow orders; only an apiculture network can figure out a better way to solve the problem, or account for things you didn’t originally include.”

“I see.” A pause. “How do you get the hives to talk to each other?”

“They leave pheromones, they dance at each other, sometimes they create new hives.”

“How do you program them?”

“Most programmers use a silicon-based interface to program in pheromones for the bees to interpret and carry out.”

“Cool.” Eridan draws a few lines on the table, aimlessly, with the tip of one finger. His claws are clipped short.

Sollux drinks some more coffee. He hates to say it, but Earth coffee is better than the stuff in the Fleet. He doesn’t know if it’s the water or the beans themselves, but he is going to miss the hell out of Earth coffee when this assignment is over.

It’s probably the water, now that he thinks about it.

“What’s the deal with internet piracy, then?” he says.

Eridan sits forward in his chair, propping his elbows up on the table. “There’s a bunch of deals. Which one are you interested in?”

“Which one are you studying?” Sollux asks, and raises the mug to his foodflap again.

 

 

Eridan sends him an email later that day: _Dinner at my place later this week? I’ll cook._

Sollux stares at the screen of his husktop, at the email. Eridan types in black text, no signature style in sight. It’s like corresponding with an AI.

 _iim allergiic to alterniian honey,_ he responds, because while technically untrue, the truth would be out of place. _otherwii2e, iill bee there. where and when?_

 

 

Eridan’s apartment is on the third floor of a nondescript building. Inside, there’s a cookingblock, an ablution block, a recreation block, and a closed door, presumably the respiteblock.

The apartment smells of cooking meat, and Sollux masks his appreciative sniffing by taking off his jacket - gold and violet embroidery on the black wool, the pins of his blood sign worked in on either side of the collar, with his name badge at the breast.

"I made -" Eridan starts, and then makes a noise that Sollux has no idea how to even start interpreting.

"What?"

He makes it again, then adds, "P - H - O. A Vietnamese chicken noodle soup."

 _Vietnamese -_ 'ese' on the end can denote language or nationality, probably the latter - 

"Where's that?" he hazards.

"Vietnam? East Asia." Eridan takes the few steps over to the cookingblock and washes his hands before stirring a pot.

"But this isn't," Sollux starts, adrift, and Eridan grins.

"I can't promise it'll be as good as a street vendor in Ho Chi Minh City, but I do my best." He tosses some thin, pale noodles into a pot and stirs. "What do you want to drink?"

"Water." Also give him a chance to test the beans-or-water coffee hypothesis.

Eridan's drinking Coke, the Earth variety. Once the drinks are on the table, he drains the noodles, puts them into concave nutrition structures, and pours broth over them, then hands one to Sollux.

"How do you feel about chopsticks and spoons?" Eridan asks, opening a drawer and pulling out...sticks. That he puts in his concave nutrition structure.

"I have no clue what those are." The ceramic is hot in his hands, so he sets it down on the table.

"I'll teach you later, then," Eridan says, picking up a fork and spoon, and they sit down to eat.

It's - good. Really good. Alien, literally, but better than Fleet rations, better than when he would cook for himself back on Alternia. Not better than what he has with Feferi, but good.

Eridan uses the sticks like pincers to grab bundles of noodles or chunks of meat. Sollux watches this for a while, then Eridan offers to teach him, and when Sollux agrees, Eridan gets another pair and drags his chair over to Sollux's side of the table so they're sitting next to each other.

"The bottom one you hold like this," Eridan says, taking one of them out of his hand, "yeah, like that, and then the other one's like this..."

Sollux tries to pick up a piece of meat. It bobs into the broth, then resurfaces. He tries again, manages to pick it up, but it falls back in as soon as he tries to carry it to his food flap.

Eridan laughs, warmly but without scorn, so Sollux tries one more time, and this time he manages to actually eat it.

"There you go," Eridan says, smiling, and he makes to stand up to move his chair back, but Sollux grabs the front of his sweater-vest and holds him there long enough to kiss him.

Eridan's mouth is cool as glass, refreshing after the heat of the soup, and Eridan's hand cradles Sollux's cheek, thumb tracing the slope of the side of his cartilage nub, the rise of his cheekbone. 

Sollux feels himself make a soft rumble of pleasure, more than he hears it, and Eridan licks once more at his mouth before pulling away. His lips and aural fins are tinted purple and he's breathing hard. 

Sollux runs his hands down Eridan's sides and feels the faint rises between his thorax-encirclement bones that means his thoracic gills are starting to flare; Eridan shivers quietly beneath his touch and they flex closed.

Eridan stands up, pauses, like he's waiting for Sollux to stop him, and goes back to the other side of the table, dragging his chair with him. Sits down again, eyes wide and aural fins still flared.

Sollux unbends a leg to knock his foot against Eridan's, and carefully doesn't look up from his soup, not even when Eridan laughs briefly and self-consciously.

He finishes his serving, thinks about asking for seconds, and decides against it.

When Eridan's done eating, Sollux says, "Where should I put ―" but his tongue won't come up with the words in English, except for a calque of the lowblood Alternian _nutrition implements._

Eridan doesn't seem to notice. "The dishes? In the sink."

Sollux stands, takes his and Eridan's concave nutrition structures and glasses to the plumbing basin, and begins to wash them. Nepeta, obsessed with romance, had been constantly explaining human courtship and mating rituals to him, and apparently this is one of the more well-known ones. _You cook, I'll clean._

After putting away the leftovers in the refrigeration hull, Eridan takes up a towel to dry the pieces Sollux has finished washing, standing beside Sollux at the plumbing basin.

"It was good," Sollux says, then, as Eridan sets one of the sticks into a rack for drying, "The food."

"Thanks." 

"Where'd you learn how to make it?"

Eridan draws the towel along the concavity of a spoon. "My mother works in the Department of State, and when I was in middle school, my family did a stint at the consulate in Ho Chi Minh City."

Middle school for Americans usually happens around five or six sweeps, he reminds himself. "That's in Vietnam?"

"Yeah. I didn't learn to cook there; I just picked up a taste for the food." He sets down the fork, the last of the implements to need drying, and hangs the towel over a hook on the wall. When he turns back to face Sollux, he's already reaching out to him, and Sollux, holding him close, strokes down his spine, fingertips drinking in the cool of his skin.

 

 

They end up curled together on the reclining furnishing in the recreation block, Eridan’s brainpan tucked under Sollux’s chin, their legs tangled. Sollux is careful to keep his hands away from Eridan’s gills this time, even through the layers of his shirt and sweater.

“Where else have you lived?” Sollux asks. One of the bookshelves has photographs on it, but without his glasses he can’t see that far.

( _“Those aren’t your glasses; those are your eyes,” Eridan breathed, marveling, when he took Sollux’s glasses off to kiss him, his own already on the table next to the furnishing._

 _“Yeah,” Sollux said, and Eridan’s mouth curled up in a smile before he drew his thumbs over Sollux’s eyelids and kissed him again. Sollux was afraid to ask if Eridan saw light leaking through his lashes._ )

“My mom was with the Fleet Consulate when I was adopted, along with a few other baby trolls, and then we moved to Arizona for three years, and then there was a stint in Chile that I don’t remember. Um. Korea was after that, and then Vietnam, and then we came back to the US and were in Oklahoma, and then back to Vietnam, and then I went to college. My parents are in Moscow right now, though.”

“You’ll have to show me on a map.”

“Oh, okay, yeah, just...” Eridan begins to unwrap himself from Sollux, but Sollux tightens his arms.

“Later.”

Eridan curls back into him, presses a kiss to his neck. “So you’ve never been home, since you became an adult?”

“Alternia itself doesn’t need Apialienators. It’s just wigglers there.”

“Without adult supervision?” Eridan smiles against his skin.

“They don’t need it.”

“And it doesn’t go all _Lord of the Flies_?”

“...I don’t know the human version of that book.”

“Buncha kids get stranded on an island without any adults. They go crazy and start killing each other.”

Sollux spends a few moments breathing, feeling the pressure of Eridan against him. “That’s the whole point,” he says finally. “It’s preparation.”

Eridan stiffens. “That’s _fucked up_.”

“Conquest is – Alternia can’t support the whole population. And even if it could, the social structure is unstable. The Fleet structure protects the hemospectrum. It’s easy to reassign people within their corps if you think they’re trying to make plots.”

“Yeah, that’s not authoritarian as all fuck _at all._ ”

Sollux shrugs with the shoulder not buried in cushion. “It is what it is.”

Eridan breathes out. “Makes me want to set up a torrent server for the dissemination of social justice writings.”

Sollux lets his palm come to rest against the back of Eridan’s neck and says nothing.

 

 

Before he gets back to his hotel room he goes to an internet cafe, pays in cash, and tries to be as unremarkable as possible for a troll in a cyber-café late at night.

He has a husktop he made from supposedly-scrapped pieces and from doing a little skimming off the Apialienator Quartermaster's supply chain. It's as secure as he can make it.

Using the cyber café's Wifi to access an anonymizer, he writes an email to Feferi.

_hey,_

_don't know iif you knew, but a few grub2 iin our clutch were giiven two earth. know anyfiin about iit? one of them miight bee a pretty good candiidate for iinclu2iion, but he'2 calm enough ii'm not going to turn my back._

That was vague enough that it might not get him killed, and Feferi challenged, if the backdoor he made into her networks were to ever be cracked open, but coherent enough she'll catch what he means. Eridan's a seadweller, who are changeable as waves, unwise to turn your back on. But calm, weirdly so. And possibly valuable to Feferi's cause, of cutting down the Condesce and bringing changes to the Empire.

He touches his thorax and runs his thumb over the pendant of diamond-shaped porphyry he keeps on his bug tags. Anyone who needs to see his tags will get their day fucked up by it, if they bother to look up what that pendant means and he's not in a state to tell them. Her Disdain's moirail, Sollux Captor, dirtsucking pissblood and the best Apialienator programmer in twenty sweeps. If he says so himself.

 

 

The empty frames arrive a couple of days later, so he rolls up his sleeves and helps install them, paying attention to spacing and placement near the flowers.

The major barrier is that bees, even the specially-bred ones used in apiocomputing, are still animals, driven to not just reproduce but also multiply. The university's apiculture network will need room to expand, and he doesn't want to be returning every sweep to help them set up a new comb.

As tempting as it would be. Eridan is - pretty, and clean, and very humanlike, for all the horns and fins, and he cooks better than Fleet rations to a degree Sollux had forgotten was possible.

He'll admit to thinking about coming home to Feferi with Eridan on his arm, and the symmetry of having tyrian Feferi in his diamond and high-purple Eridan in his heart, the way it would go with the Apialienator uniform. Feferi's already fond of showing Sollux off because of it; having Eridan there as well would balance the look of things.

And Sollux and Feferi wouldn't keep having to share a pail come drone time in their lack of flushed partners, either, which would be glorious. He loves her dearly, enough that it makes him feel helpless and small and his thorax hollowed out, but sex isn't part of that love.

(Who would know that Her Disdain is fond of violent video games, and screams imprecations through her headset, swearing until the Web might as well be blanketed in rusty obscene enthusiasm?)

He sends her a few 'personal' emails from his work computer, over the wi-fi at the small hotel catering to Alternian guests to the city. He's careful to mention in vague terms that he's met someone, not naming names or species. There have, after all, been a few trolls who fell in love with humans and deserted.

She responds to the supposedly-personal emails with similar vaguenesses: she wants more details, on everything; she's never been to Earth and it's possible she never will. She's curious about this new acquaintance and for his own good needs to vet them, to keep him from getting out of control in his fondness. 

Once, he sends her an email talking about a tech who annoyed him, not a personal hate but situational, and she responds with a gorgeous, nearly pornographic email talking him down.

 

 

The bees themselves arrive at the end of the month, hand-delivered by an extremely nervous freshly-Ascended orangeblood Apialienator who has clearly not only been stung a few times, but has also been harassed at Customs, briefly detained pending confirmation of her assignment, been stranded from her moirail for some time, and just wants to be back on her ship in her own recuperacoon with her moirail beside her.

Getting the system set up takes forever: the bees are fussy and are taking too long to acclimate. When he’s sure he’s behind schedule, he calls his superior officer, Cyanolieutenderizer Halkam, requesting an extension.

Halkam is a high green too yellow for true cerulean, power-hungry with being denied the promotions within the Apialienators that he deserves. In his frustration he vacillates between sycophant and antagonist in his interactions with Sollux, who would be rising in the ranks even without his moirallegiance with Her Imperial Disdain, and with it will probably outrank Halkam within the next five sweeps.

The results of the call are, essentially, that Halkam can't threaten him because Sollux is nigh-on untouchable thanks to his ties to Feferi, but that Halkam would like to be able to threaten him. Sollux is okay with this state of affairs.

 

 

Sollux has never been any good with food - Fleet rations were an improvement over his larvahood cooking, so he's not real picky. 

One date Sollux brings over grubcake that he bought from a tiny little corner shop not far from the Alternian consulate, and Eridan makes _fish_ , of all fucking things to serve.

Sollux had never had fish before the first time he met Feferi in person. Fishing isn't allowed for lowbloods. Indigos can, with special permission, but not a dustmouth like him. He's allowed to eat it if Feferi serves it, but not - not otherwise; that's a sumptuary crime. 

Eridan might as well be laying his heart out in front of Sollux, asking if it's red enough.

He lets Eridan finish his slice of grubcake before walking around the table and kissing him, Eridan's mouth cool against his own, tasting sweetly of the cake. Sollux breaks away, starts kissing his way down Eridan's neck, sliding the flat of his tongue over the slow-opening gills there, and Eridan moans, aural fins flaring wider as he fumbles at Sollux's shirt. 

Once Sollux's shirt is open, Eridan stands up, pushes Sollux's shirt off him, and curls his hand around Sollux's side right under his vestigial grub legs. Uses the leverage to drag him to the reclining furnishing and pull him down beside him.

Eridan's shirt is still buttoned, so Sollux takes care of that, wrangles first Eridan's and then his own jeans open.

They've gotten here before, just once; Eridan stopped him, clearly terrified Sollux would find his bulge freakish. Warned him it _moved_ , like he thought Sollux had never seen a seadweller's bulge before.

So they just made out for a while, until their food flaps got sore and they got tired. No pails, all perfectly NG-7. 

He's ready for that pail now, if Eridan is. 

Eridan's bulge curls, half-unsheathed already, against his hand through the cloth of Eridan's boxers, shifting against the cloth even as Eridan's hands skim down Sollux's sides towards his hips.

There's a lot of people who say that they'd never flushfuck a fish 'cause they're too cold to be comfortable. But Sollux doesn't mind. Keeps him anchored. And anyway, he realized when they made out, Eridan warms up with a little exercise.

Sollux tucks his fingers under the waist of Eridan's boxers, and the tip of Eridan's bulge sneaks up, presses against the pad of one finger. 

"Let's get these off," Eridan says, and shifts off the couch, standing up. Sollux follows him.

"While I'm up," he says, "where's your bucket?"

Eridan's brow furrows. "What?"

Sollux facepalms and covers it up by rubbing at one eye. "Don't tell me you just spew," he licks at one of his fangs, making sure of the English slang term in his memory, "jizz everywhere when you have sex."

"Oh!" Eridan's fingers curl around the top of one of his own socks, bent up like a strange bird. "Yeah, in the bathroom, under the sink. And I guess..." He takes off the sock, drops it on the floor next to its fellow. "I guess a bed would be a better place for this."

 _Bed_. Flat soft non-pile that humans sleep on. Not a recuperacoon. Bed.

How the _fuck_ has Eridan not gone on a culling spree if he's not using sopor?

"Yeah," Sollux says, because the reclining furnishing isn't really wide enough.

"There's troll-use condoms in the nightstand," Eridan says, disappearing into the ablution chamber and emerging with a plastic bucket.

"Condoms."

"Yeah."

"What?"

Eridan's eyebrows go up, and he inhales, then breathes out deeply. With his jeans open and low on his hips, and his chest bare, he looks like the models in Propadoppelgandist advertisements for the various corps, only none of the models are ever tyrian, and none of them ever look frustrated. "Condoms. Plastic. To keep from spreading diseases."

Sollux brushes the words away. "The Fleet screens for sexually transmitted diseases." And culls what's not curable. It's easier that way.

"And if, theoretically speaking, _I_ had one?"

This is fucking ridiculous. "Fine." He wants to get laid, not argue about Eridan's germ phobia, so he opens the door to Eridan's respiteblock and steps inside.

No recuperacoon in sight. Just a rumpled bed, with dark blue sheets ( _wrong!_ whisper all his sweeps of socialization), a nightstand with a book on top, and a husktop on a table to one side. 

Eridan sets the pail down next to the nightstand and sits on the edge of the bed, looking at Sollux. His eyes are clear, and his horns draw jagged lines in shadows cast by the streetlight outside the window. The light cuts the shape of his body into relief, sharpening him from muscle into steel.

Sollux, still in his pants, kneels on the floor between Eridan's legs and rests his hands on the inside's of Eridan's still-clothed thighs.

"Are you bulge- or nook-focused? Or neither."

Eridan shrugs. "I'll let you know what I like when I like it."

That's singularly unhelpful.

"Pants off," he says, since that's a good start, and Eridan obligingly shoves them down. Sollux lifts each leg in turn to strip them off completely, then reaches between Eridan's legs, to where his half-unsheathed bulge twists wine-dark with blood between his thighs. 

The tip curls, lukewarm now, against his fingers, dry but charming, and he draws the backs of his fingers up the length of it to the sheath, then further, stroking along the muscles around Eridan's nook, and then back to Eridan's bulge when he finds them closed.

Eridan is soft and flexible in his hand, curling against his skin, pulsing every so often. Sollux isn't much for his own nook, but he wouldn't mind finding out what Eridan felt like inside him. 

He pauses at the touch of Eridan's fingers against his temples, and closes his eyes against the flare of his psiioniics. He isn't ready to trust Eridan with that much. But Eridan just leans down to kiss him, tongue curling against his, and when they part, Sollux leans forward, draws his tongue over the very tip of Eridan's bulge. 

That sends Eridan flailing for the nightstand, and Sollux, bored, counts powers of two for a bit while Eridan digs out a plastic bulge sheath. _Not_ sexy. 

"Do you really need to?" he asks, while Eridan opens the wrapper. 

Eridan's bulge curls into the plastic bulge sheath, which is long and thin and clearly made especially for seadwellers. Even so, there's no way it'll hold genetic material, so Sollux doesn't know what the fucking point is. 

When he responds, Eridan's voice is a low buzz of annoyance. "Yes." 

Sollux's guts perk up. He's always had a kink for black-red quadrant vacillation, even if Eridan is definitely flushed for him, and if he just pushed a little, until they were tearing at each other... Eridan would make it really good, he can feel it.

He turns, burying his face into Eridan's thigh and kissing along it, working his way to Eridan's now-encased bulge. It slides easily into his mouth, thicker closer to the sheath, and even if it tastes of plastic, the red pheromones rising from Eridan's skin cover up most of the taste. Eridan curves into him, hands stroking at his back. It’s strangely endearing, more so than the twist of his bulge in Sollux's mouth and the hitches in his breathing.

By the time he's fully unsheathed, his bulge is half-curled in Sollux's mouth, too long to fit all the way in without choking him. The rest pulses rhythmically in Sollux's hand, and his hips and thighs and bulge are hot with arousal.

Sollux's bulges are long unsheathed, desperate for some kind of stimulation, and his nook is open, clenching every time Eridan moans. 

He realizes, when Eridan rocks against the flat soft non-pile of the bed, that Eridan's nook is relaxed open, tyrian wetness gathering rich just inside him. And he clings to Sollux's shoulders, gasps like he's crying when Sollux strokes at the sensitive flesh the muscles of his nook were hiding. 

Eridan pushes him away not too long after that, fumbles the plastic bulge sheath off and drags his hand over his bare bulge a couple of times before he drains into the bucket, half-filling it.

Sollux pushes the pail aside, leans his head forward to rest it on Eridan's thigh. Eridan's nook still smells temptingly of salt and flushed pheromones, and Sollux can't tell if he wants it smeared all over his bulges or filling his foodflap, but either way he has to - 

He fumbles his pants down enough to jerk himself a few times before he's coming, too, topping up the bucket.

Eridan bends down to kiss him, a shallow stroking of tongues. "Stay the night," he says.

Sleeping without sopor isn't really a pleasant experience, but Sollux is willing to go one night without if it means he'll be able to get another round with Eridan tonight and sleep a little later in the morning tomorrow.

"Okay," he says, and leans forward to kiss Eridan back. 

 

 

Midway through installation week, Eridan drops by the developing Apiculture Network Facility near the end of Sollux's shift. Merach, the trainee, is helping Sollux check the bees' developing comb structures, which are not doing very well, and look for signs of egg-laying, which are also not appearing. Sollux is quietly beginning to lose hope, so Eridan's appearance could have been a welcome respite.

Merach notices Eridan first. Tilts her head up in submission, swallowing with nerves. Even though the headphones cover his aural fins, Eridan's neck gills are showing, flared - it must be raining out - and that he is a seadweller is unmistakable.

Sollux stands up from kneeling in front of one of the frames, leaves the room, strips off the oversuit he was wearing to keep pollen from getting out, and goes to Eridan.

"Who's that inside?" Eridan asks, pushing his headphones down around his neck, where his gills are starting to close. 

"Merach. She's been assigned to me for the time being."

"Should I say hello?"

Sollux licks his lips. "That would be really fucking stupid. I'm - probably going to get in trouble anyway now, but talking to her probably won't go anywhere good."

Eridan pauses, gaze flicking over Sollux's shoulder and mouth tightening. "We're talking about that later." He drags the headphones back up to his fins, turns on his heel, and leaves.

Merach's gaze flickers up to him when he steps back inside. "Who's that?"

"Student at the university."

"Didn't know fins went to Earth for school."

"This one does."

And that should have been the end, but Merach grinned and said, "Wouldn't mind getting better acquainted with a face like that. Quadrant of yours?"

Sollux curls his fingers around one of the gas cans. Easy enough to kill her psiioniically and make it look like he'd clubbed her to death. No one would dare prosecute on Earth, although it would be an interworld relations nightmare. Annoy Feferi and save Eridan, or leave Eridan to the wasps.

"Not really." Saving grace: Eridan doesn't exist in the Alternian records database. Sollux isn't dumb enough to assume Merach doesn't have access to official sign registries - she's an Apialienator, after all - but she'll assume Eridan's among the signs that are claimed. And from that distance, it'll be hard to tell with any degree of accuracy how purple he is.

"Aiming for one?"

"Don't know." Permanently long-distance relationships are normal within the Fleet; most trolls get ship leave for Twelfth Perigee's Eve, which coincides with the arrival of the Imperial Drones. The ones that don't, get Sixth Perigee's Rising, by Imperious demand. Sollux and Feferi have been long-distance since before they left Alternia, but seeing each other once a sweep, both being in the Fleet, is a far cry from what he and Eridan would have to be if they were to go officially red.

And Sollux would give himself up to the helm before he let Feferi die for failure to contribute to the filial pails.

 

 

He walks to Eridan's apartment after he gets off-shift. He calls halfway there, offers to pick something up since Eridan doesn't want to eat his cooking.

So, halfway through a nutrition plateau of takeout Chinese, Eridan says, "Why don't you want me talking to your assistant?"

Sollux lays down his fork. "She's not my assistant. I outrank her by four grades." A pause. "I didn't know her before this assignment. That makes her not automatically my ally."

"Why do you need an ally?"

Sollux shakes his head. "You're ahead of me. You've noticed blood colors in trolls being different?"

"Yeah. I'd heard of it. Has to do with social rank or something, doesn't it?"

Understatement of the fucking species. "Until the Condesce implemented the Exodus and instituted merit-based promotions, Red- and Orange-bloods were peasants and slaves, and Yellow-bloods like me weren't much better. Up through green is the technical class, merchants and artisans, and starting at blue is the minor aristocracy. Indigos are as a class religious nuts, and higher than that are seadwellers. Royalty." He reaches over, draws a fingertip along the webbing between Eridan’s fingers. 

Eridan swallows. "I don't think I like where this is going."

"Her Imperious Condescension, and her heir, the Disdain, have a shade of blood so high on the hemospectrum that it appears only once in a generation, and it's known as tyrian purple." He licks his lips, swallows. 

Eridan puts down his fork and says, very calmly, "So purple it looks pink, I'm guessing."

Sollux pushes his nutrition plateau away. "There's been a tyrian-blooded male before. His name was Orphaner Dualscar, and he tried to overthrow the Condesce."

Eridan says nothing.

"Traditionally the Condesce and the Disdain fight publicly, and the one who wins rules, and the one who loses is culled. Killed. But the current Disdain isn't interested in battling the Condesce."

Eridan closes one of the takeout containers. "Which means political instability. Add another tyrian-blood and everything goes to fucking pieces. You going to want any more of this?" Eridan tilts another takeout container, full of noodles and meat, in Sollux's direction.

"No."

Eridan closes it, quick little motions of his wrists. "I've done enough reading on Alternian culture to know that eugenics is alive and well there. So why am I still alive?"

Sollux's foodflap goes dry.

Eridan's eyes are dark and his jaw is clenched. "Politically inspired mercy," he says, bitterly, and takes the closed takeout containers to the thermal hull, tearing the door open. "So I can't talk to another troll without them realizing that I am," he waves a hand in frustration, "a civil war in waiting."

Sollux shrugs. "You're fine as long as no one political finds you."

"And how do I know if they’re political?"

Sollux has a half-second of terror, and then reaches into his shirt for his bug tags. "You're so fucking beyond being found by someone political that if I were you I'd have cut my fins off last perigee and preemptively put myself in a corpse repository." The porphyry clunks onto the food preparation surface, the tags themselves jingling along for the ride. 

"What's that?"

"My bug tags."

Eridan raises an eyebrow, but looks down at them. Takes one in his hand, and then looks back at Sollux.

"Can't read them."

"So of course that's why I'm showing them to you," Sollux spits out.

Eridan's expression closes off, and he touches the pendant. "I'm sure as hell not culturally aware enough to know what you're showing me."

"I'm the Disdain's moirail."

"And...?"

"Do you know what that means?"

"No, enlighten me."

"I'm one of her romantic partners, and calling me a tech is such an understatement it's a lie."

Eridan makes a soft noise, dropping the pendant onto the counter, wiping his hand off on the leg of his jeans. "So not only are you cheating on your girlfriend, you've potentially pulled me into a political situation I might not survive."

Two seconds later, Sollux realizes two things:

i) Eridan doesn't actually know about quadrants.

ii) There's something very, very wrong with Eridan.

And he realizes this because, after he punches Eridan (with his fist, he had at least that much control) for accusing him of doubling up his quadrants with Feferi and misrepresenting their relationship, instead of going highblood fucking shithive on him and either ripping his guts out or fucking him stupid on the floor, Eridan stands there, touches his cheek, and says to Sollux, "Get the fuck out."

Sollux tosses his bug tags back around his neck, grabs his coat from the storage subblock, and sees himself out.

He goes to a different internet cafe than usual and pours the argument out to Feferi in a desperate email. About Eridan not knowing about quadrants, assuming that Sollux was cheating on Feferi with him because of his stupid human non-quadrant One True Romance system.

Almost immediately she sends him back a link to a video of cuttlefish swimming. and he watches that for a while, zoning into it while he waits for her response, which comes after not too long a wait.

 _Me too_ , she starts, _I mean, not like that at all, but I'm in a reely terrible mood and I just want to hit someone and I miss you and everyone is treating me like I'm weak for not wanting to cuttle everyone in sight all the time!_

_There's a seadweller who wants to do things to make me fight the Condesce and doesn't listen when I tell her no! So I had my security locks keep her out but I can't stop getting mad about it and it's not even the good kind of mad!_

_And while we're at it have you heard that Liesmith is planning to have Maliar culled? It's reely gross and I want to pardon Maliar but I don't know if I can and it's scheduled for next week and I don't know if I can afford to lose my Propadoppelgandist. I might have to talk to Gamzee to get a Writ of Mirth to stay it and I hate doing that even though a little blood contribution isn't a big deal but it's so fetishy and while I understand he can't help it I wonder what his moirail is doing!_

_And of course Maliar is locked up in a different ship - I had to plead with the Cyanolieutenderizer to keep her in this cohort - and the Apialienator from the Jorgunmand froze her files and I can't get to my schedule since she hadn't updated my copy on my computer._

They send emails back and forth for a while, always a little guarded in word choice but never emotionally. They can't afford not to be: Maliar is a Propadoppelgandist, in charge of mediating both Feferi's schedule as the Disdain and also her social life, but is also an anchor in Feferi's underground reform movement. Maliar wasn't dumb enough to keep the paperwork for Feferi's supporters on her official networks, but if the Apialienators are going after her on some sort of spurious charge Sollux needs to duplicate and shut down Maliar's secrets before anyone else gets to them. He doesn't know who's on the Jorgunmand, but the odds aren't good: Feferi has extensive public support in the hemospectrum below green and almost none above cerulean, with a few notable examples, and the Jorgunmand is too high-ranking in the Fleet to put an Apialienator below lime on finding evidence for the culling case against the Disdain's Propadoppelgandist. There'll also be intercorps tensions with the Legislacerator assigned to the case, which might slow the tech side down...

Or not.

It's the middle of the night, both here and on Alternia; he can't risk anything now. He'll deal with it in the morning, after he's slept a bit. 

He and Feferi both know he can pull it off. He's done it before, after all.

 

 

He gets up early and sets the parameters for the search and delete, then hacks into Maliar's system, past the Apialienator blocks. He's going through an anonymizer on Earth, then another within the Fleet, then one on Earth, as he works, and finally manages to install the stupid program on Maliar's computer, then lets it run. It's just past sunrise by Fleet time.

At work, Merach is almost as respectful as she was before, and Sollux doesn't cull her for potentially ruining his flushed quadrant, if only because the queen bee has laid some eggs, which is promising.

After a couple of days he sends a message to Eridan: 

_let'2 meet and work 2ome 2tuff out ii'd hate two mii22 out on a good thiing ju2t beecau2e of an iintercultural mii2under2tandiing_

Eridan writes back, _You call punching me an intercultural misunderstanding?_ but at least he's written back at all.

(Sollux's coat still smells of their mixed flushed pheromones, and sometimes he presses his cartilage nub into the fabric and just inhales. Eridan and Feferi themselves actually smell alike, though Feferi's flushed pheromones don't catch in his chitinous windhole and go straight to his libido the way Eridan's do.)

_ii wouldn't cheat; iit would bee two dangerou2, he responds, then adds, iif you're 2tiill iintere2ted, ii'll meet you by the cafe under the train track2 at eiight twoniight._

He refreshes the client a couple of times, but no response is immediately forthcoming. 

At the cafe that evening, he gets there early and orders his coffee, then sits waiting at one of the tables by the windows, facing the door. While he's waiting, he doodles potential strategies for programming a hack into chat clients that will use their bandwidth to carry unrelated files without being obvious. This he's sketching by hand, for now, if only because he's not taking a clean computer out near Eridan.

Eridan is a couple of minutes late, and is carrying his own coffee. He sits down across the table from Sollux, and says, "I Googled you, finally. Had to look up what quadrants were, but I can see why you got pissed."

He nods. That saves him a lot of explanation that he hadn't been looking forward to.

"But you have to realize that I'm not quadranted, and I don't want to be."

Sollux's thinkpan grinds, shriekingly, on its brakes.

"What?"

"I'm not quadranted. You can have," he waves a hand, brushing the words away, "yours; I can hardly judge your individual choices in this case. But I'm not."

"You've never hated someone in the kind of way where you wanted to kiss them and smash their face in at the same time."

Eridan shrugs. "Not really."

That makes no sense, including biologically, but it's Eridan's love life.

Sollux sips at his coffee, then says, "A lot of people got pissed when Fef and I got together 'cause I'm a dustflap pissblood and a mutant." Eridan's cheeks color a little, probably thinking about one of Sollux's more obvious mutations, and Sollux bounces his knee a little, bringing himself back on topic. "Can't have the Disdain getting pacified by someone who can't breathe underwater." He pauses, looks at Eridan's expression, attentive and calm. He talks about Feferi like she's meat and Eridan doesn't even know any better.

"But nobody's killed you," Eridan points out.

"Yeah, because trolls are fuzzy, gentle people," Sollux says, and is surprised when Eridan laughs instead of getting mad. "It's not because people haven't tried; it's because after I culled them the others decided to wait, and then I got promoted a couple of times. The Subjugglators think their members getting picked off is the best comedy around, but the rest of the Corps put out hits on anyone who culls their officers who isn't in that Corps, fish excepted."

Eridan brushes a finger along one of his own aural fins. "Fish means seadwellers?"

"No, it means aquatic scaled nonsentient beasts." He has to resist the urge to reach across the table and slide his fingers along Eridan's fins, stroke along the ridges of cartilage inside, watch them flare and turn blood-dark. 

Eridan's mouth flickers into half a smile, and he sips at his coffee. "So you're a little more than just another tech dweeb."

Sollux shrugs. "I'm the best fucking tech dweeb currently in the Apialienators."

Eridan laughs, slides his hand across the table to rest his fingers on Sollux's. His hands are warm from the reflection of the coffee's temperature, so Sollux turns his wrist, lets Eridan's fingers press into his palm. It's comforting without being smothering, and Sollux spends the night in Eridan's bed.

 

 

By the time another Apialienator comes to replace him on semi-permanent assignment, Merach has long been recalled to her duties and her probably-pining moirail, and Eridan stays away from the network hives and doesn't meet the replacement. 

Sollux is also desperately homesick. Eridan is good, is horrifyingly kinky in ways that are commensurate with his human socialization, is calm and stable, but he heats Sollux up rather than talking him down, and even with frequent correspondence, being separated this far from Feferi is hard.

Two nights before he's set to leave for the Fleet again, he and Eridan have dinner together, and afterwards Eridan lets him lick, slowly, at the slits of his gills, and then inside them. Eridan's thorax heaves like he's forgotten how to breathe, face flushed and gills swollen open. Sollux fucks him, after, both bulges pressing into Eridan's nook, and almost doesn't make it to the pail.

Neither of them says anything like _see you later_ or _keep in touch_. Sollux’d like to, but it’d be dangerous for everyone if he didn’t let Eridan fade out of the notice of everyone around him.


	2. part two

The knock on Eridan's door comes mid-afternoon. He's not expecting anybody, so figuring it's some undergrads or evangelists who'll run at the sight of him, he opens the door and finds himself face-to-face with three trolls, all of whom are bigger and bulkier than him, and all of whom are dressed in an offensively civilian manner. They aren't prominently wearing their blood signs, even, and he remembers how Sollux was nearly religious about making sure he had a blood sign marker on him somewhere no matter where he went - said it was law, in the Fleet.

"Mr. Ampora," says the lead one. He has the same accent as Sollux did, not that that's statistically improbable in any way.

"Who are you."

"May we come in?"

Subjunctive - well-trained in English, formal. Lead one has blue eyes, though Eridan has no experience with differentiating hues. The two in the back are wearing sunglasses.

"I'd prefer that you didn't."

The lead troll bares his teeth, leans his chin down a little. "I don't think you mean that."

Which only confirms his original impression. "I'm not interested in Alternia."

The grin widens. "We can talk about this inside."

Eridan sighs, closes his eyes, opens them. "Are you going to make me an offer I can't refuse that involves choosing, in the here and now, between going with you peacefully and going with you by force?"

Blue Leader doesn't move. "Yes."

"Give me five minutes to get my coat and something to eat." Although he doesn’t feel the cold much, even two days before the end of term, it’s still windy. He makes a sandwich from what's in his fridge, expecting that if he ever gets back it will all have gone bad, gets his coat on, and locks the door behind him. 

The three trolls walk with him out of the building - someone must have held the door for them - and then into a car, where he is blindfolded, and they drive for a little while. Then they get out - something covered, he thinks, but open to the elements - and, still blindfolded, he's walked up a step, through a door, into an uncarpeted hallway. Wood flooring, maybe. There's a loud humming noise, and the smell of metal, and his ears tingle with electricity.

They push him forwards, not so hard he falls but hard enough to put him off balance, and just as his ears _scream_ with electrical current it's gone, over - damp. Very damp.

The humming increases briefly twice behind him and then shuts off. He is walked some more, into another room, and then the blindfold is taken off.

He is standing in front of a table of three trolls. Unlike the muscle that came to collect him, they all have fins, and they are all wearing prominent symbols - one on her shirt, another as a tattoo on one cheek, the third in the curve of his horns. All purple, none so purple that they're pink.

Eridan suddenly wishes he'd had the foresight to email Sollux, even if they haven't spoken or written since Sollux returned to Alternia. Fuck his life.

"We have," says the woman with the tattoo, her lipstick close to the color of eggplant, "an offer to make you." 

Eridan doesn't see a chair set out for him, so he stays standing. "I'd prefer to refuse, if that's an option. Also, don't tell me I'm the only one that's seen _The Godfather_ in all of Alternia."

Horn-sign's lips purse. "We think, given your training in human modes of thinking, that you will find the arrangement we propose mutually beneficial."

Tattoo leans forward. "As you can see, we are not high-blooded enough to challenge the current holder of the throne, nor her Heir. But you can. Return to Alternia. We will teach you how to fight and defeat her in combat. Once you have done that, you will take up the position of Condesce, and institute reforms as you wish. We'll handle the small details of the Empire's day-to-day existence for you."

Put a puppet on the throne, run it for him. "And the alternative?"

T-shirt smiles at him like a shark. "Regrettably, you are capable of identifying us, so we would cull you. But in exchange for your participation, we can also offer you your matesprit back."

You know, despite it being part of the script that he was half-expecting, it's surprisingly effective. In his moment of weakness and loneliness, to offer him the opportunity of having Sollux again, for as long as Eridan wants him - but that's a false choice.

"I didn't like him that much."

The troll in the t-shirt taps their - Eridan can't tell if they're male, female, or neither - claws on the table, and says, "Trolls who do not fill both their concupiscent quadrants when the Imperial Drones arrive are culled. Although we can protect you this time, you need to cultivate your bond with him if you expect to survive in the future."

Eridan follows...most of that speech. "So assuming he manages to survive the drones this time - when is this, by the way? - he'll be brought to me anyway, because otherwise I'll be killed."

"Yes." T-shirt doesn't blink.

 

 

He's taken to a little room and left there. There's a pile of blankets in one corner, and a table and a chair in another. He goes to the blankets and sleeps for a while, because why not, he's got time to kill. He wakes up eventually, rolls over, goes to sleep again. 

Somewhere around hour six, or maybe ten, he's not sure - the constant near-darkness throws off his time perception - one of the goombahs brings him a tray of food: noodles and water. There's a fork. It has three prongs.

"You know," he says to the goombah, "Feeding me near-prototypical prison rations isn't exactly endearing your bosses to me and engendering loyalty."

Goombah leaves without responding. Eridan eats. After a while, goombah returns, collects the dishes, and goes away again.

He was carrying some loose change in his pockets at the time he was kidnapped, so he pulls out a quarter, tries to spin it on the ground. His phone, of course, doesn't work ― probably got killed when he went through what he recognizes in retrospect as a world gate ― and there's only so much you can do with a wallet containing:

\- Twenty-seven dollars (one twenty, one five, two singles)

\- credit card 

\- transit card

\- insurance card

\- driver's license 

\- university ID

\- photo of his parents on their thirtieth wedding anniversary

\- two copies of his business card

\- a photocopy of his American passport

\- a condom

He builds a very tiny house of cards. Four times. Sings his favorite indie songs, forgetting most of the lyrics. Sings numbers from _The Sound of Music_ and _Cats_ and wishes he had forgotten those lyrics.

Around the time that he's seriously considering Christmas carols, he remembers that the use of bright lights is a standard disorientation technique on humans that can cause sleep deprivation when maintained for long periods of time. Put it in combination with what amounts to solitary confinement - is this meant to soften him up?

The next time the door opens, it's Blue Leader and the Two Little Goombahs. He's dozing on the pile of blankets, but stands up when they enter.

"You will be permitted to return to your hive and gather those things that are necessary to you. We will watch to make sure you do not escape or leave any messages."

That's fair enough.

The blindfold goes on again, and they walk through the corridors to the humming of a world gate. They go through. Another car ride, one in which he can't keep track of the lefts and rights and speeds, and they're back at his apartment.

He grabs his toiletries, his pills, a couple changes of clothes and a couple more of underwear. Offers the goombahs the leftovers in his fridge, and puts it back when they don't accept it. 

All the clocks are gone from the walls, and his phone is still broken, but from the sky it's probably no later than two in the afternoon. 

After so long in darkness, even this much light feels good.

He takes his laptop, even though he doubts he'll be able or allowed to use it, but his keepers don't object.

When he's done, he locks the door behind himself, gets in the car and submits to the blindfold again.

 

 

Instead of being taken to the dank little cave-room again, he finds himself in a rather more grandly-appointed facility, one with luxurious pale-purple themed furnishings. There's a small round window that looks out on an expanse of water.

"You may go where you like, as long as you remain on the ship," Blue Goombah says.

"And if I want to go swimming?" Eridan asks, gesturing to outside the window.

"There will be a guard on the ship who will know if you leave."

That's both ominous and unhelpful, which seem to be Blue Goombah's main traits.

He puts his suitcase and messenger bag down on the floor, turns, and leaves the room to explore the so-called ship.

It's stranded on an island, and looks less like it was actually stranded than like it was built on a crag as a house that looked like a ship that had run aground. The windows are all small and round, like portholes, but the furnishings are all too rich and heavy for a real ship. 

Up on deck three trolls are playing some dice game lit solely by the stars; when they notice him they all stand, as though awaiting some order. He nods and continues on his way.

He eventually finds a poorly-stocked kitchen, a room with a bed and a strangely organic computer on a desk, and a bathroom. Most of the other rooms are locked.

He boots up the computer, whose keyboard he can't read, and finds that it logs right in. No security, not that he expected any. Maybe if he figures out how the system works he can close it off a bit - he's no kind of computer person, not really, despite his research topic, but he'd like it to at least be usable. Besides, he wants to send a message out to someone that tells them where to look for him.

The desktop...doesn't look like Windows or Mac, and those are the only OSes he knows how to navigate.

The desk has drawers; looking through them, he finds what looks like an immobile caterpillar sitting in it; when he picks it up he sees that one end of it is shaped vaguely like a USB plug if a caterpillar had decided to attempt to look like one, so he leans over the computer and sure enough, there's a port to match.

He doesn't plug in the caterpillar thing, because he has no idea what it would do. Even knowing that the computer is probably already bugged – ha! – he isn’t willing to risk whatever it is that’s on the caterpillar.

He is, frankly, bored, and wishes he had thought to bring a book. He’s not even sure if the guards on the deck speak English.

He returns to the kitchen. Opens up the fridge. There's some green beans, what looks like a chunk of red meat, three apples. What are the guards living on, takeout? There are pepper and salt shakers on the counter, and a half-empty bottle of green sauce in one of the cabinets. The label looks a lot like ketchup, but when he takes the cap off, it smells _nothing_ like ketchup.

He takes a different route back up to the deck, ending up in a spot where it's harder for the guards to see him.

Three guards. All three are wearing blood signs ― two in t-shirts and a third with what looks like a tattoo on the back of his hand. The t-shirts are in blue, the hand-tattoo indistinguishable from this distance. 

He walks up, lets them see him coming. They stand. 

"Any of you speak English?" he asks.

"Yes," Tattoo says. He - doesn't have an accent. Or, he does, but it's a flat Midwestern American. "Me'n Adebon do." He gestures to one of the t-shirts, who nods.

"You're American," Eridan says, blankly. 

"Raised there, anyway," hand-tattoo says. "Blood outs. Zerian Haavar." He sticks his hand out. The tattoo is a lightish blue-green.

"Eridan Ampora."

Adebon offers his own. "Adebon Brady." He’s broad-shouldered, heavily muscled. His smile is lopsided, guarded. "Glad to see you've come back to this side of the world gates."

Eridan shrugs. "The argument they made was very convincing." He bids a brief and regretful farewell to his ability to make American pop culture allusions without anyone understanding that he's making fun of them.

Zerian laughs, gestures to the third troll, who looks merely confused. "This is Kolzea Ayenro." Kolzea, instead of shaking hands, nods faintly, raising her chin. Her hair is cut in a buzz around horns that curve forwards faintly, and she has a generous bust. 

"And you three are my keepers?" Eridan asks, lightly. 

Zerian smiles. "Essentially. Adebon and I are here for language and culture training, and Kolzea for combat. We'll look after you. Once you're set with us, it's to the throne with you."

 

 

The language lessons start the next day.

" _Ayem_ ," Zerian says, pointing at a sharp-edged squiggle.

"Ayem," Eridan sighs, for the third time. Fucking English diphthongs.

" _Bedt_."

"Bedt."

"Good, you've stopped aspirating the final consonant. _Cess_."

Eridan curls his fingers on the deck table, listening to waves against the ship's hull. "Sesh."

"Not _sh_ like _shit_ \- you ever study Chinese? Like Deng Xiaoping."

Eridan curls his tongue. "Cess." An approximant, maybe. He's never been trained in linguistics.

"If you want to listen to someone who doesn't have an accent, there are a few tutorials online," Zerian says.

"I don't know how to use the computer. It's all in Alternian."

Zerian tilts his head. "I'll set the keyboard to English for you."

"Thanks."

Zerian boots up the computer, fusses with the settings a bit. Double-clicks on an icon that opens into what looks like a browser window, types keyboardsmash into the address bar, but it comes out English text. He sits back into his chair, looks at Eridan, and says, "How 'bout lunch."

 

 

He goes to bed a couple hours after sunset, and is awoken in pitch-darkness by someone dragging him out of bed onto the floor.

"What the -" he starts, and then a hand grabs one horn and uses it to drag him to standing.

Kolzea is standing there, holding out one hand, palm up, fingers spread. 

"What are you doing?" Eridan says. The base of his horns is smarting.

Her hand curls into a fist, then back flat again, before she seizes his elbow and drags him to the deck.

On the deck, the stars are clear, enough to see okay by, and the salt breeze goes through his lungs easy.

She's holding a trident. No, a double-ended trident. 

He takes two steps back, but she holds it out, carrying it in both hands, neither business end pointed at him. So he takes it.

It's heavy. Six feet long, probably, made of metal. The points look very real.

This is not reassuring in any way.

She moves towards him, moving to his side. Her hands are empty, open, and then she lays her hands over his, repositioning his grip. One hand about three-quarters of the way down the haft, the other about his own hip-width apart from it. She nods, lets go, then thoughtfully taps the weapon's haft and says something.

"What?" He shakes his head.

She sighs. Repeats it, tapping the weapon. Maybe what it's called?

"Ithnala –” he gives up partway through. She grins, all teeth, and pats his hand, one claw scraping at the back of his wrist, and moves away from him, reaching to a weapons rack - was that there yesterday? - and pulling out a wooden staff, slightly shorter than what he’s holding. 

She holds it, similarly to how he’s holding his weapon, and then she pantomimes stabbing with the staff.

He attempts to follow her example. She grins, flickeringly, and tilts her chin up with a rasping sort of laugh. Repeats the gesture.

He does it again, and this time she puts her weapon to the side, reaching to move his thumb so that his hand is in a loose fist around the haft. He watches her, helplessly, and she flicks one of his ears with a claw, making him wince, before she takes the weapon out of his hands and puts it out of the way.

She makes him do pushups until he can’t anymore, though in all honesty that’s not very long, lets him rest five minutes, and makes him go again.

_Then_ he gets to run laps around the deck of the ship.

 

 

With the computer newly usable, he spends some time browsing some internet forums he’s interested in, keeping up-to date on the news. The only differences is that he has to sneak this in between physical training sessions – his language skills aren’t really getting any better, so he and Kolzea are still at the “miming” stage of instruction. Judging by the dates on the news, he’s been here just under two weeks.

Around the time that he stops feeling like he’s going to die halfway through Kolzea’s training, a message arrives in his personal email inbox.

_ii need a favor._

_What?_ Eridan sends back.

_my diictiionary tell2 me that what ii’m a2kiing for ii2 a ‘booty call’, wiithiin the next couple of week2._

_I’m not at home._

_why are you on one of the alterniian coloniie2?_

Eridan deliberates about that one for about thirty seconds, and then there’s a knock on the door before Adebon steps in, closes the door, leans against it.

“I’ll give you the choice,” he says, “to answer that.”

“But there’s a right and wrong answer,” Eridan says. He is, somehow, unsurprised that they are watching his computer.

“Yyyyyyup.” Adebon smacks his lips together at the end, enunciating it, and tucks one hand in his jeans pocket.

“If I say the wrong thing, what happens?” Eridan asks.

“Depends on how wrong you are.”

Eridan takes his hands off the keyboard, puts them on his lap. “How does ‘I decided to effect a life change’ go over?”

Adebon taps a finger against his own hip. “That’ll do just fine.” He stands there while Eridan taps out the message, then says, “Tell him you’ll be happy to see him whenever he comes by.”

Eridan dutifully adds it, then sends the email.

 

 

He negotiates with Sollux where they will supposedly be meeting, though in reality Adebon and Zerian tell him what to write. And anyway, it can’t be truthful, because the directions and landmarks they’re telling him to give are those of a city, not a deserted shipwreck island.

So he’s not surprised, a couple of days before he and Sollux are supposed to meet to spend a week together, when Adebon says, “We’re going off-ship.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to put a bug on you,” Adebon says. “If you try to run away, one of us will trigger it remotely, and it will release a neurotoxin into your bloodstream. You will die slowly and in pain.” There’s a pinching at Eridan’s lower back. He tries not to think about it.

“Fantastic. Does it ever come off?”

“I’ll remove it when we’ve returned to the ship.”

His three wardens take a small boat away from the ship in the middle of the night, and Eridan stretches out muscles that still ache from all the physical exercise Kolzea has been making him do. 

The kitchen is well-stocked, surprisingly so, from the twice-weekly runs to a presumably-nearby town. He fixes himself a stew, puts the leftovers in the fridge, checks his email. He considers warning Sollux about whatever’s coming, but Sollux is important enough to be missed. Someone will come looking for him, and to top it off he’s a professional programmer and hacker. As long as he’s alive he can probably do something. Eridan dying trying to get the message to him would be stupid. 

It would ruin the plans of the people who are keeping him. But it would also be tantamount to suicide, and Eridan can’t say he’s ready for that. He was hoping to live long enough to get tenure someday. Still is, really.

 

 

A day and a half later, or, well, night-and-a-half might be more accurate, given that he’s been prodded into being fully nocturnal, the little boat returns with four people in it.

One of them is knocked out. He knows who it is. He should’ve said something, should have taken the consequences rather than let things come to this, and he feels sick over it, but seeing Sollux again...

He helps carry Sollux over to one of the empty rooms and puts him down on a couch. Sollux is warm against him, even unconscious, his eyelids thin-skinned. His glasses are disarranged, so Eridan slips them off his nose, folds them up and sets them next to Sollux’s head on the cushion. 

He watches Sollux for a few moments, spreads his fingers through Sollux’s hair to check for any damage, not that he’d be able to feel it if there were, then sits down in a chair with a copy of some of Zerian’s ayembedt handouts to wait.

 

 

Sollux stirs a couple of hours later, eyebrows furrowing, and then he opens his eyes, blurrily. He licks his lips while Eridan watches him from the chair.

“You,” Sollux says finally.

“If it means anything, I didn’t choose to be here, and I didn’t choose to tell you to come.” Eridan says.

Sollux closes his eyes, breathes for a few moments. “I figured.”

“How do you feel?”

“Dizzy.”

“Do you want some water?”

Sollux’s face goes greyer. “No. I have weird reactions to drugs.” 

“Should I be trying to get you to a doctor?”

“No.” Sollux’s eyes close. “Don’t be scared.” They open again. This time they’re not just red and blue, but they glow as well, and there’s lightning crackling around his head. One of the portholes in the room shatters, then so do the rest. Sollux groans softly, grabbing his head. Everything in the room starts to hover six inches off the floor, trembles, then crashes down again.

“Sollux?”

Sollux has passed out. Eridan goes to the bathroom to have his freakout in private, and hopes that the effect was limited to just this room so that none of his keepers noticed.

 

 

Sollux wakes up again an hour or so later, and after Sollux checks for recording equipment or a microphone, Eridan brings him up to date on what he knows of the situation.

"Do you remember the blood signs of the seadwellers?" 

"Maybe." He scrawls a few lines on the back of a piece of paper, then shrugs. "If I saw one of them again, I might."

Sollux gets off the couch, turns the paper to be right side up for him. "This one I recognize," he says, tapping it. "Seadweller, damaged gills?"

"They were all seadwellers. Can you be more specific than that?"

Sollux pauses, exhales. "It's important to identify at least one of the three, because if I know one, I can probably figure out the rest. You don't get into treason without your moirail at the very least."

Eridan pauses, licks at one of his own teeth, then says, very quietly, watching Sollux's face, "Is that the voice of experience?"

Sollux drops his chin, sudden and sharp, and glares at Eridan through narrowed eyes. "If you say things like that in public and I'll kill you myself," he says, voice low and buzzing with temper. His grammar is usually perfect.

It's true, then. Sollux and the heir to the throne are planning to take it by force. And Sollux doesn't trust Eridan to keep that secret ―

Well, Eridan said it himself. Throw a third tyrian into the rainbow soup of the Alternian sociopolitical structure and you have a civil war on your hands. It's what the three seadwellers probably want.

No. He closes his eyes, breathes. No melodrama. As far as he knows, they want him to win the throne as a puppet for them. He doesn't know what the heiress wants the throne for, or what she would do with it. If it would be for the power itself, or to enact reforms.

Sollux would kill to protect her.

"What's her name?" Eridan asks.

"Whose?"

"The heiress's."

"Feferi Peixes," Sollux says, then, slowly, "Peixes." The sibilant-like sound at the end is different this time. "Her title in English is `Disdain.'"

Eridan turns back to the piece of paper, closes his eyes. A curve there, and a straight line here. He draws it again.

Sollux nods. "I recognize that sign. Very conservative." He turns away, paces for a few moments. "Was one of the others tattooed?"

"Yes."

"Good." Sollux runs his hands through his own hair, disarranging it, and pushes his glasses back up. Stops. "You probably want to ask about what I did."

"Yes."

Sollux gnaws on his lip for a moment, staring into the corner of the room, then says, "I have certain skills that are very valuable and very unusual."

"You're psychic."

"That's _not_ unusual. Most people with warm blood are. I'm stronger than most, and what I can do could be very useful." He touches his own wrist, then says, "I don't want to say more."

_Don't you trust me,_ Eridan doesn't say. It doesn't matter. What you don't know can't be tortured out of you. Or picked out of your mind by a psychic, Christ. Better not to know.

"Whatever it is you could be doing, you don't want to do it," he says instead.

"No."

"Okay."

Sollux shakes his head briefly, as though dismissing a thought, then closes his eyes and rubs at his own temples, then checks his pockets. He makes a face and doesn't pull anything out, so whatever he's looking for isn't there. "Where's my bag?"

"Don't know."

Sollux mutters something that is probably obscene in Alternian and sits back down on the couch.

"There's a computer in the other room," Eridan says after a moment, "but it's being monitored."

Sollux leans back in the couch. "It'll be good for me to stay off the web for a while."

Eridan can't help but raise an eyebrow. "A military-grade programmer and apiculture network expert, go offline?"

Sollux grins, turning sideways to lie on his back on the couch and closing his eyes. "This thing you call 'a vacation.' It sounds fascinating; where do I buy one?"

"Not here," Eridan says.

"What do you mean? I heard they're usually sold as a 'be forced to take one, be blackmailed into bringing someone else' deal."

Eridan puts down the ayembedt charts. "For what it's worth, I really am sorry."

"I know." Sollux puts a hand over his eyes. His raised elbow is a jagged shock of bone. "The drug aftereffects are giving me a migraine. Is there a recuperacoon anywhere?"

"I don't know; I'll go ask."

"I can look." Sollux heaves himself up off the couch, goes to the door.

They find the recuperacoon one door down, along with Sollux's bag. Everything in it has been taken out and left lying on the floor, spread out and clearly searched.

"Good," Sollux says, looking at the mess.

"What?"

"Nothing," Sollux says, but he's smiling grimly. "Do you use sopor to sleep?"

Eridan shakes his head. "I hope you feel better."

"Yeah." Sollux takes off his glasses, sets them down on a little table next to the glowing slime-filled mass of the recuperacoon, and Eridan closes the door behind himself as he leaves.

 

 

Eridan is running laps on deck in the middle of the night, stretching and strength training to follow after, when Sollux mounts the stairs and stares up at the night sky.

“Pretty weather,” he says, as Eridan passes by him.

Eridan huffs out a laugh. The next time he passes Sollux, he says, “Stars aren’t bad either.”

Sollux grins at him, perching on the deck railing.

By the time Eridan’s completed his full set of push-ups, Adebon and Sollux are talking, and he watches them for what must be too long because Kolzea taps him, warning-hard. At least he recognizes his own name in an Alternian accent, now.

When Kolzea gives him a break, Sollux waves him over. Adebon is saying something in Alternian to Sollux, too quickly for Eridan to catch more than that Adebon is using the present tense.

Adebon stops talking when Eridan leans against the railing.

Sollux turns to him. “You like swimming?”

“Depends,” Eridan says.

Adebon’s eyes flick down to Eridan’s chest, where his gills are hidden under his t-shirt. “It would probably be better for you than running laps. Also get you accustomed to being underwater.” His mouth twists. “If you want, you can go swimming after midnight. Be back before dawn.”

“Or?”

“Or you’re outside in the sun,” Adebon says, then gestures to Sollux with his shoulder. “Or we’ll hurt him.” 

Sollux smiles, all his teeth. “What would he run away _to_? There’s a whole empire waiting for him.”

Adebon shrugs, says something in Alternian, nods to Eridan. “Have fun,” he says.

Once Adebon is out of earshot, Sollux says, “It’ll be good for you.”

“What did he say?”

“The drones won’t come here.” Sollux stretches, still sitting on the railing, his back arching and head tilting back to expose his throat.

“And you trust him?”

“Always,” Sollux says, deadpan.

Eridan casts a glance over the deck. Adebon and Zerian are probably belowdecks, making their own lunches; Kolzea is nowhere to be seen. He stands up straight. “Better make sure we’re ready, then. In case he’s wrong.”

“Just in case,” Sollux agrees.

 

 

Dropping into the ocean is like being punched in the soul. The gills at his throat and between his ribs flare open, as the water closes over his head, and the wash of salt through them leaves him lightheaded, gasping for – for water.

His eyes are open, but his inner eyelid is shut tight, allowing him to see without grime getting in. He blinks furiously a few times, unused to the sensation, before getting accustomed to it. Just floating there, breathing. Not breathing. Feeling the wash of water over and through him, hovering there in the water. He can hear the creaking of the ship, feel the water currents and temperatures flaring around him.

He kicks off the side of the boat, swims deeper, looks at the structure supporting and anchoring the ship. Pylons, it looks like, sunk into the sand at the bottom. He’s no engineer, but someone wanted this ship _here_ , and wanted it to stay.

He surfaces eventually, when he’s gotten his fill of looking, and clambers up the ladder at the side of the ship. Sollux is on-deck, reading an article that Eridan downloaded from JSTOR before being kidnapped, about the spread patterns of internet memes.

“Who put this ship here?” Eridan asks.

“What?”

“Someone put this ship here. It’s not a shipwreck, even though it’s supposed to look like one.”

Sollux’s face goes tight. “Probably the same people who sent you to Earth. Dualscar’s ship,” two taps on his knee, like he’s looking for the word, “crashed during his defeat.”

“What?”

“He lost to the Condesce. And ran. Into an island.”

Eridan feels a drop of water slide along the rim of one of his gill slits. That single gill flexes open, then shuts tight again.

Sollux looks up at him, then shrugs. “You’re Dualscar’s blood heir. If they dress you up in his clothes and give you his hive and his weapon... Have they taught you to shoot?”

“What?”

“Have they taught you to shoot a gun?”

Eridan shakes his head.

“Huh.” Sollux runs his fingers over the computer keys aimlessly without pressing them. “Dualscar had a gun. It’s never been found.”

Eridan rolls his eyes. “I’m sure it’s just buried muzzle-first into a rock somewhere waiting for me.”

“Probably something like that,” Sollux agrees, without even a trace of irony.


	3. part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay in the next section - I moved in the middle of my self-imposed posting schedule, which threw me off. I promise the story is totally complete (and has been since about last October). I've just been so terrified of coding the footnotes, despite how easy it is, that I kept procrastinating on this one.
> 
> Please note the tag changes!

Eridan is awoken around midday, not by a lifetime’s habit of diurnal living but by Sollux tapping on his shoulder and pointing upwards.

“You hear that?”

There’s a roar of something like an engine coming closer. Eridan nods, and Sollux pushes himself away from Eridan’s side and out of the bed.

“Where do the guards sleep?”

“In a little cabin on the other side of the ship...” Eridan says, watching Sollux yank on a pair of pants. Sollux walks out of the room without putting a shirt on, and closes the door behind him.

By the time Eridan has staggered his way out of bed, into pants, and onto the deck, Sollux is haloed with the fading aftershocks of blue and red sparks around him, and there are several small airships hovering above, casting the deck into shadow. 

One of them is right over the ship’s mast, and there’s a troll woman clambering down the rigging. She jumps the last ten or so feet to the deck, cries Sollux’s name in Alternian, and nearly knocks Sollux over with a hug, heedless of the aura of red-blue flickering faintly around him. It dies the moment she touches him.

She has ear fins, and the sides of her dress are cut out, revealing gills that are closed in the daytime almost-dryness. Eridan doesn’t need to see the insides, or the flushing tint of her ears, to know who she is. 

She’s gorgeous, all long limbs and generous curves and a sharp-toothed smile, and in Sollux’s embrace – she even lifts her leg, God – she is picture-perfect. _Lovely as all the stars,_ Sollux had said, ineffectually trying to soothe Eridan’s jealousy back on Earth, and Eridan can see why. 

Sollux rumbles something into her hair, and she answers, before they fall silent again. There are more people coming down onto the ship, now.

Eventually she and Sollux let go of each other, and Sollux says something that has her turning to look at Eridan.

“Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there,” she says, taking the few steps to meet Eridan. “You must be the one Sollux met on Earth. I’m Feferi.” Her accent is like Sollux’s, albeit in a higher register, and her smile as she offers a hand is friendly, for all the teeth.

Since he doesn’t actually know the etiquette for greeting alien princesses for the first time, Eridan shakes her hand. “Eridan Ampora.” At Sollux’s twitch he appends, “Your Disdain.”

She laughs. “I am the _least_ disdainful. Are you always like this?”

Bemused, Eridan shrugs, and she grins at him. “Tell me you listen to terrible music and like Honey computers better than Apiculture Standard Frames because _they have prettier graphics._ ”

“Oh my God,” Sollux groans.

Eridan raises an eyebrow in his direction. “The American equivalents, yes.”

“Oh, perfect,” she says. “I keep losing those fights with him; if we both team up maybe he’ll succumb.”

Sollux throws up his hands. “I am exclusively attracted to computer illiterates,” he mutters, but he rolls his eyes when Feferi leans over to kiss his cheek.

“So where are your minders?” she asks. “I assume you were guarded.”

“Three, belowdecks,” Sollux says. “I’ll show you.”

Feferi gestures to two of the other trolls on deck; they follow as she and Sollux head down the stairs.

“Are you going to kill them?” 

Feferi stops, looks back over her shoulder at him. “Do you think I should?”

“No. They don’t – I like them.”

“Stockholm Syndrome,” Sollux says.

“Then use it on them,” Eridan says. “You’re not supposed to be here, are you? You’re not here officially. You’re here to take the ship for your own plans.” He swallows. Feferi, in this ship that is themed to Eridan, who is supposed to be blood-successor to a traitor – she could use him. Could take over his space and call him attempted usurper and use him to shore up her support.

In the stairway, the sunlight blocked by the heft of the ship, Feferi’s eyes are luminously pink. “I don’t believe in killing.”

Her back, as she turns away from him and follows Sollux down the stairs, is a mess of scars, thin and dark, old wounds over old wounds.

 

 

Sollux stays with Feferi as she coordinates landing the ships and setting up the camouflage fields. It’s the middle of the day, so he’s fading, but she’s on shiptime, which is still night, so he makes do. He slept a little before this, anyway, even if it was on a bed.

As they’re both catching a snack around dusk, he says, “Thank you.”

“For coming to get you?” She flicks his aural flap, a stinging non-pain. “Silly. You told me to come get you if your Apialienator security tracker was triggered. Of course I came. I would have come even if you’d told me not to.”

He smiles, despite himself. “What’s the official reason for you coming here?”

She shrugs. “That I wanted a vacation.”

“They’re not going to buy that,” he says, right as Feferi’s chief security officer, Xevral, walks in to talk about the prisoners.

 

 

Feferi wakes up when Sollux slides into the sopor beside her. He’s comfortingly warm, smelling like Eridan’s flushed pheromones as Feferi tucks her head against his shoulder.

“I missed you,” she says. She said it before, when she first held him again after he was sort-of missing for nearly a week, but it’s still true.

He huffs. “You missed being warm in your sleep.”

She bites his shoulder, not too hard, and he rests his hand over her side, fingers sliding between her sopor-flared gills.

“Couldn’t even email you. Being away from you is bad. Being out of contact is...” His bare back curves into her touch. 

“Ssh.” She strokes along his spine, like he’s a stingray. “Not for much longer.”

He blinks, jerking to look at her. “What are you planning?”

She tickles at his side. “I want to expose the people who kidnapped you.”

“And?”

“Well...” 

He cups her jaw in both his hands. His palms are so soft, not calloused like hers. She rests her hands over his, closes her eyes. “Maliar says that since we have him, we should include him. Use him to flush Her out.”

Sollux exhales, making little waves in the sopor. “Don’t ask me to send him to die.”

“Don’t be stupid!” She tears his hands off her cheeks, laces their fingers together. His are wider than hers, curling uneasily against the back of her palm. “He doesn’t even want it! We both know he just wants to go home to Earth and be a student again! He has a mom and dad, like a human! No, I mean, if we let it be known that I came here to follow up on your hunch that there was something treasonous going on, and that you found him being kept here... He can come forward and name the people who kidnapped him.”

“That sounds like a _fantastic_ idea, let me just get your culling fork ready. He doesn’t wake easily so you won’t have to worry about him trying to escape while you _stab him in his sleep._ ” 

Feferi growls and bumps her forehead against his shoulder a few times in frustration. “That’s not it!”

“If you make Her think that he was involved in treason, She’s going to cull him. She’ll challenge and cull him. He’ll never be safe as long as Torngill, Meltlead, and their third conspirator are free, but you can’t do anything through official channels because once they’re caught his existence will become officially recorded and then She’ll cull him anyway.”

“So we don’t have a choice then, do we?”

Sollux wraps around her, buries his hand against the back of her head and his face in her shoulder. He’s so warm. “Sometimes I wish I’d never met you.”

“No you don’t. You liked _Sunlit Hordes_ too much.”

“It had a stupid inventory management system.”

She strokes her fingertips along his spine, up to pet at the hair at the nape of his neck, down to his lower back where he has the scar from the assassination attempt, and then back again, until he drifts to sleep against her shoulder.

 

 

Eridan wakes up before anyone on the ship is up and about, so he makes himself toast with some sort of bright blue jam that tastes weirdly like the way Christmas trees smell, and goes out on deck.

The last glimmers of sunlight are still on the horizon, but the stars are out in the other direction, and the wind is damp enough to make the gills at his neck open, so it’ll probably rain later in the night.

Once it’s full-dark, one of the other people on the ship comes onto the deck. Eridan wasn’t introduced to her, but her blood sign is an overlapping triangle and teardrop, embroidered in green on the sleeve of her official uniform.

She spends a couple of minutes walking back and forth on the deck, then finally comes over to him and enunciates, in heavily accented English, “My name is Maliar.”

“Eridan,” he says, getting up off the railing, and offers her a hand. She stares for a moment, then shakes. She has some kind of hand injury or birth defect, her fingers curled up unmoving. 

“I work for the Disdain. I am her public relations coordinator.” 

“Is it hard?” He sits back down, waves her onto the railing as well. 

“No. It is dangerous, and therefore rewarding.”

“Dangerous?”

“It is the Fleet.” She shrugs. “You are Sollux’s matesprit. The tyrian-blood no one knew about.”

“I prefer ‘grad student’.”

She doesn’t even quirk her mouth. He’s not sure if that’s because she didn’t think it was funny or because she didn’t get it. “I have spoken with the Disdain.”

“And?”

“You can’t go back to Earth yet.”

He’d known that, somehow, but hearing it said out loud, by a near-stranger, makes it hurt more. He had intended to take _japchae_ to Desiree’s end-of-quarter potluck, to spend New Year’s with Stan and Nafisa getting buzzed, to live in the library all December doing research. Instead he’s on a boat.

And _he’s_ the fucking mermaid.

“Because the people who kidnapped me know where I am, here or on Earth, and they can’t be exposed without revealing my existence.”

Maliar nods. 

“So we have to wait to expose them until I can survive being revealed.” He closes his eyes, feels the weight of muscles in his arms that weren’t there before. The faint memory of pressure from Sollux kissing his shoulder.

Of all the universities in the all the cities in all the worlds...

The waves splash against the side of the boat.

“Well,” he says, nodding to Maliar, “If life has gone to the trouble of making a bed for me, I should probably be polite and lie in it.”

 

 

Sollux wakes up when a hand seizes his arm and bodily drags him half-out of the sopor. He’s halfway to freezing his attacker with his powers when he smells sex and sea brine and jam, and he knows it’s Eridan, so instead he props his elbows up on the rim of the recuperacoon and holds his head up, blinking into consciousness.

“Evening,” Eridan says.

“What do you want.”

“While I’m flattered that you care about me enough to want to keep me from being terrified by keeping me in the dark –”

Sollux gets lost. He’s good at English, really good at it. But on not-enough hours of sleep, still woozy with sopor, dealing with Eridan’s fully-developed over-educated adult vocabulary isn’t happening. 

“Stop.”

Eridan goes quiet, but the gills on his neck start to flare with irritation. 

“In an hour. To wake up Feferi, take a shower. Then talk.”

“Fine.” Eridan turns on his heel and storms off.

Sollux slips back into the sopor, touches Feferi’s shoulder, slides his fingers up through her hair.

“Beloved,” he says, not even trying to cover the way the pale-endearment suffix shows off his speech impediment, “Feferi, wake up.”

“Go fuck yourself with the business end of a computer cable,” she grumbles, rolling over.

“You should stop playing FPS games. C’mon, get up, my matesprit is upset with both of us and I want to get laid again soon.”

 

 

Eridan is waiting for them on deck, and Maliar is sitting not too far away, looking suspiciously interested in her tablet. Maliar must’ve said something to him about what she and Feferi talked about last night.

Feferi doesn’t blame her. There was no way for Maliar to know that Eridan _wouldn’t_ know what was going on. Her boss’s moirail’s matesprit - professional relationships have been ruined by more tenuous romantic entanglements, or at least in some of the romance novels that Feferi’s read. She doesn’t know a lot of people whose romantic relationships conflict with their professional ones, except for some really volatile kismesissitudes, like that thing Sollux almost had with the Apialienator who specialized in Helmsman interfaces and training.

Sollux sits down on the railing not too far from Eridan, just enough space in between them for Feferi to sit in the middle. Well, _that’s_ interesting. And a little awkward, honestly. She and Sollux are pretty firmly committed, and that thought of that relationship being destabilized by his dynamics with Eridan makes her nervous. Probably they need to talk it out - come to think of it, they didn’t talk much about anything that wasn’t related to either near-future plans or Eridan yesterday. And with Eridan now being upset with him... 

She has a brief sense memory-fantasy of being cocooned in softness, close to Sollux, full of the smell of him and the warmth of his understanding, the sense of his soul’s edges and the searing light of him, knowing and known.

Seated on the railing between the two of them, one of her arms is as cool as her own from Eridan’s skin, the other hot with Sollux’s. _Boys._ Sometimes Sollux is really more stereotypically male than he thinks he is: out of contact with his own emotions, and because of it controlled by their intensity.

“So,” she says in English. “You wanted to talk to us.”

“I can’t go back to Earth,” Eridan says, “because the three seadwellers know where I am and would either kidnap or kill me.”

“That sounds about right!”

Eridan huffs out a breath in amusement. “And you can’t stay here.”

“I have to report back in less than a week, yeah,” Sollux says.

“So _I_ can’t stay here, because the three seadwellers know where this place is and can get to it easily if it’s not defended.”

Feferi wrinkles her nose. “I could leave a few people here, but not many. But no.”

“So I can’t exactly escape the people who kidnapped me as long as I’m living as me and as long as they’re still alive.”

“I mean, probably not on Earth, and you couldn’t join the Fleet here,” Feferi says. “I guess you could hide on one of the colony worlds, but...”

“I thought so. And you can’t expose my kidnappers as traitors without revealing my existence to the authorities.”

Sollux shifts his weight, pulls his glasses off and start polishing them on the hem of his shirt. “This is all really fascinating, but unlike you two, I’m going to die before the end of the century, so get to the point.”

Eridan makes a strange noise, slides off the railing onto the deck, and walks past Feferi to stand next to Sollux. “What do you mean?” His expression is strange, somewhere between confusion and horror and misery.

“The only known way for a tyrian to die is to be killed,” Sollux says. “I, on the other hand, plan to die in my recuperacoon at seventy-two, during sex with someone half my age.” He’s looking up at Eridan, and the way they look at each other...

“Or someone who looks half your age,” Feferi points out, because if _she_ doesn’t push them together nobody will. So she has a thing for hemospectrum-defying romances. She’s certainly not the only one. 

Sollux elbows her between her gills, but he doesn’t look away from Eridan. “So. Your point.”

“Let me stay with you so I can see it through. If I’m going to be revealed anyway, let me have a chance of defending myself when I’m revealed. Teach me how to fight.”

It’s all too easy to imagine him in Dualscar’s style of dress: the broad shoulders made broader by the lines of the clothing, and the torc of gold around his throat, jagged in a stylized sea-wave. Serrations to her curves, to the vivid geometry of Sollux’s sign.

Train him enough, and reveal him at the right time, and he would fight the Condesce for her. If he loses, she loses nothing, and her relationship with Sollux is deep enough that they would choose each other over any other quadrant partner. Even if he wins, he doesn’t want the throne anyway. He knows nothing about how to rule, let alone how to rule Alternia.

And Sollux is falling in love with him. For that alone she might help him.

“Can we trust your staff?” Sollux asks.

“Mostly,” Feferi says. “Not entirely - my Intelligensalvager team thinks there’s at least one spy on board the _Tessentintel_ , but the _Khukurictus_ is definitely clean for now.” She reaches up, takes hold of Eridan’s hand. Traces the webbing between his fingers that’s the same as hers, writ on larger hands.

“Come with us,” she says.

His eyes are lit from the moon reflected off the water. “Okay,” he says.

 

 

The _Khukurictus_ is Feferi’s adjunct ship, apparently; it’s smaller, faster, lighter, and more lightly armed. The _Tessentinel_ is of a battle class, though not nearly as extravagant as the _Condesce_. Feferi has the privilege of managing, through her staff, the crew of the ships, so while nobody actually says _Core of support for the Disdain to plan her takeover of the throne,_ Eridan hears it loud and clear.

Eridan stays on the _Khukurictus,_ and gets taught how to fight.

It starts with hand-to-hand combat: not just how to punch, but where to punch. Joint locks and nerve strikes, and the body language to avoid ever needing them.

The first time he meets Partol, the second-in-command of Feferi’s security, he gets his chin pulled down during the introduction, and when he jerks out of Partol’s grasp Feferi lays a hand on his shoulder.

“You shouldn’t tilt your head up when you’re talking to someone, especially not when you’re meeting them,” she explains. “They might cut your throat!” 

“ _What_.”

Feferi turns him away from Partol, lays her hands on either side of Eridan’s jaw. “If you keep your chin up,” she says, “your throat is exposed.” She draws the point of her claw in a line across his neck. “But keep it down while still making eye contact, and you’re a little shielded, and besides that, you’re showing off your horns.” She tilts his face down a little. “Yours point back so they’d be better for defense than for attacking, but you could still probably break blades with them if you really had to!” Her grin as she says it is disconcerting.

“Doesn’t that hurt?”

“It’s better than dying, don’t you think?”

He sighs, straightens his shoulders, jerks his chin up instinctively and then pulls it down. 

Partol laughs. Feferi is polite enough not to.

 

 

Sollux gets a call from Halkam, three days before his scheduled return to duty, to report _immediately last night_ to the nearest ship or colony with a world gate, or face being tracked down and brought in by a bountyrant. Some Earth legislacerators want to talk to him.

He interrupts Eridan’s practice and says, “Your friends are looking for you.”

Eridan’s face greys. “What?”

“It’s been a month; someone on Earth noticed that you’re missing. I’ve been called to report to a world gate to go to Earth, and speak with the police. It’s probably about you.”

Eridan exhales, turning the practice staff in one hand absently. He’s still using a wooden staff for practice, rather than the double-ended trident associated with tyrians. “What are you going to tell them?”

“That depends on what they know, and what they should know. Do you want them to know where you are? Lying to legislacerators is a crime, whether or not it’s related to an investigation.”

“Shouldn’t Feferi be here?”

“She’s working in her official capacity.”

Eridan sets one end of the staff on the floor and leans onto it. “They probably found you through my school e-mail account. Thought that since it was a significant change - whirlwind romance, you go back to Alternia, right as the quarter ends I disappear. I could’ve followed you. Add in the lure of an unknown world, and me a troll.” He licks his lips. “If you tell them you saw me, that I was kidnapped and so were you, but Feferi rescued you, and you know who the kidnappers are –”

“There’s no way they’ll believe I don’t know where you are.”

“So say you were kidnapped because of Feferi, Feferi rescued you, and you know nothing.” Eridan shrugs.

There’s still the part where he’s demonstrably not dead from a failure to contribute to the filial pails, but he and Feferi have been saving each other that way for sweeps, and it’s not like the drones can tell between one tyrian and another.

He can’t wipe out the kidnapping – that Feferi went to the colony world can’t be erased – so that much is easy.

They’ve been keeping Eridan’s wardens in the brig, so as long as the Earth police are willing to believe that Feferi let them go...

He can do this.

“No – I was kidnapped because of you, but I didn’t see you. That much I can pass, I think.”

“Okay,” Eridan says. He stops leaning on the staff, takes a step towards Sollux, who backs away.

“If I report to the gate smelling of flushed pheromones they’re not going to believe that I haven’t seen you,” he says, even though the thought of lying to the police while _reeking_ of Eridan is appealing. In a massive _fuck-you_ sort of way. But it’s better not to push, and there’s likely to be a legislacerator there who will know what to look for.

 

 

Sollux is waiting for her when she logs off from the conference. He’s sitting in the chair in her waiting room, and the moment the door is closed between her office and the waiting room he’s reaching out to hold her.

He’s worried, she can tell that much, and he wouldn’t be looking for physical comfort quite like this if he didn’t feel like he was in danger of being hurt.

“I’ve been called back from leave to go to Earth,” he says against her hair, and shivers from her cold.

An emergency at the school? It wouldn’t be anything diplomatic; they’d contact her. It could be some sort of trick, to harm her, but attacking Sollux is tantamount to attacking her, because of the legal protections afforded to quadrant partners. “Why?”

“The police want to ask me some questions.”

A crime. What crimes does he have knowledge – oh. Eridan. His friends don’t know where he is, and on Earth culling is not the norm, so friends disappearing is considered a worrying, rather than a regular, state of affairs.

“The nearest gate is a few hours away,” she says. “I’ll have the ships’ course changed.”

“I’ll do it,” Sollux says quickly, disentangling himself from her.

She watches him leave. His back is tense, like it always is when he does this.

 

 

The Helmsman of the _Tessentinel,_ before being put into the helm, was named Siraco; her sign resembles a Roman-letter cursive _f_ , where the crossbar has two short lines dropping down from it. Sollux looked up her Ancestor once ― a famous smith, who forged some of the most durable and well-known metal weapons of the ancient world. The Condesce before the present one carried a double-ended trident made by Siraco's Ancestor.

"Siraco," he says, standing next to her.

The display beside her capsule flickers up, _Hello, Apialienator Carminelieutenderizer Captor_.

"How's the ship?"

_It is in functioning order._

"Any problems?"

_No._

The _Tessentinel_ is a good ship, not so old that it's become obsolete, not so new that its Helmsman is untested.

If he'd been caught he would have been where Siraco is now. As Feferi's moirail, he would have been assigned to her by default.

"I have orders to go to the nearest world gate and answer some questions for some Earth legislacerators," he tells her.

_Now en route to new destination._

He lays his fingers over the screen. Helmsmen are trained out of their typing quirks early, to prevent those who work with them from having to interpret whatever bizarre lingo they may have adopted as part of their grubhood identity.

"If you were asked to testify," he starts, then, "if you took some video, and you knew someone was going to use it against Feferi..."

_My programming forbids me from withholding information from the authorities, although I am permitted to withhold it until a legislacerator's seal is presented and verified for the investigation, and I am permitted to exclude information that is not relevant to the question._

"What if the authorities are in the wrong?"

_Then I am required to make public the data in my memory that proves them wrong._

"Can you lock things away?"

_My programming forbids me from withholding information from the authorities._

"Can you let me lock things away?"

There's a short pause ― almost two seconds, an aeon to a Helmsman. _If carried out in the interest of defending the Heiress, breaches of law may be retroactively forgiven._

"In the interest of defending ―" The text on the screen changes.

_Come close._

He leans forward.

"closer" she whispers. He does, until he can feel her breath against his ear. He's never heard her speak before.

"A ship is a machine," a breath, two, "and trust is for things with free will."

He almost leans back, but her powers catch him, hold him there.

"Dagret agrees," she hisses, and then lets Sollux go.

He stands there, watching her for a moment. Her eyes are fervent, her mouth open, breathing hard from talking.

He tilts his head up. She has neither arms nor legs to speak of, anymore, but the gesture means the same thing anyway.

 _Arrival at the gate in less than two hours,_ reads the screen.

 

 

Eridan takes a shower after Partol lets him go, then goes to the brig. Maybe there is an element of Stockholm Syndrome to it.

He sits down on the floor on the other side of the gate from Zerian. The metal is cold through his clothes.

"Why did you do it?" he asks.

"Do what?" Zerian's hands are curled quietly in his lap.

"Leave Earth. Decide to get mixed up in Alternian politics."

Zerian runs a hand through his hair. "Earth I think you can guess. Politics, well, you try looking for a place in the Alternian system that isn't straight-up military and see how far you get. Getting asked to teach an all-but-human a little Alternian was a pretty good deal."

"Why'd you leave Earth if you knew you wouldn't fit here?"

There's a rustle of clothing, and then, from the next cell, Adebon says, "You ever try being a boy with tits on an army base? Alternia doesn’t give a shit.”

Eridan swallows, watches Zerian’s face through the grating. “Do you really care who’s on the throne?”

Zerian shrugs. “We’re dead if we leave here, so not much.”

Adebon hisses faintly, but doesn’t say anything.

"Do you know where you were keeping me? Where the ship was, I mean, and who put it there."

Adebon’s clothing rustles. "Don't know much, but what I do know I want something for."

"I have nothing to negotiate with."

Zerian smiles, bitterly. "Let us see each other."

"I don't control anything here," Eridan says.

Zerian taps on the floor twice, then points to a camera in the corner. "Ask the ghost in the shell to do it for you."

"What?"

“Troll spaceships are piloted by psychics. Put ‘em in indoctrination, hook ‘em up to bioware cables and fry their brains.” Zerian’s mouth twists. “Go talk to the helmsman.”

Eridan gets up, walks into the hall without saying anything. Presses his forehead against the metal wall and closes his eyes.

Psychics in spaceships, and Sollux’s red-and-blue sparks. His chest aches.

“Should I call you something?’ he says to the air. There’s a flutter of sound from the other direction in the hallway, like the first few notes of a piece of music, and he follows it. At the end of the hall, it plays again, somewhere else, and he follows that too. All the way to a little room in a part of the ship he’s never been to before. 

The door opens.

The cables look like membranous tentacles, swallowing up the pilot’s arms to the shoulder, and legs to the hip. There’s a small computer display next to that mess of flesh, and it says, _You will not be harmed here._

“You speak English?” Eridan says.

_The computer is equipped with an excellent translation algorithm._

He touches the screen, which doesn’t react, and then he says, “Do you have a name?”

_This ship is referred to as Khukurictus._

“No, you. Yourself.”

_It is considered acceptable to address Helmsmen with the ship’s designation._

Eridan swallows, sickened. He keeps seeing Sollux in this troll’s place, Sollux’s sign emblazoned on the breast instead of this troll’s sign, a Y crossed with a check mark.

“What should I call you?”

_Dagret would be acceptable._

“I’m glad I met you.”

_Likewise. The prisoners want to trade favors._

“Yes. I want them to tell me something, and they want me to let them see each other.”

_The computer records all location data._

“I want to go back to where I was found.”

_The Khukurictus and the Tessentinel are currently en route to a world gate so Carminelieutenderizer Captor can report for questioning._

“You’ve got to have escape pods or something.”

_The launch will be noticed and tracked._

“I don’t care about that.”

The body hanging in the fleshwebbing huffs out a breath.

“Tell them the escape pod was jettisoned but there weren’t any life forms aboard.”

Another almost-laugh. _The computer is fully equipped with Googol access. Your allusions are overly cavalier._

“Can you let Adebon and Zerian be in the same cell?”

_Yes._

“Will you?”

_Yes._

“Thank you.”

_You will be directed to an escape pod. It is preprogrammed to take you to your destination. You will be followed._

"That's all right," he says. "I'll take a few chances."

 

 

"You want me to what?" Maliar says.

"I just got a message from the shipboard computer saying that Eridan is trying to run away. Because he's an idiot, obviously, I want you to keep a tracker on him and keep it quiet." Feferi glances up at the camera in the corner of the room. "You too, please."

The computer beeps acknowledgement. Feferi taps a claw against the table. If Eridan dies...Sollux would live. It's not that strong a bond. They would both live, even if he could never pretend red for the drones again. They'd have each other.

"Don't let him die," she says, "But we can't afford to get caught harboring him. So if you have to choose..."

"The onboard computer has several probability algorithms which have already been set," her Helmsman says.

"Good."

Maliar is looking pale, her hands knotted into her uniform. "You're going to sacrifice him," she says, the tone of her voice fluttering.

Feferi remembers Maliar's tablet desktop, a photo of her with a gangly violetblood, standing together on a beach with their hair tangling together as they smile at the camera. The intimacy of the picture had been sort of discomfiting until Feferi looked up the violet's sign - culled during training, belongings distributed to moirail.

She's pale for him.

"I'm not going to sacrifice Sollux or my future for him," Feferi says, going for gentle. "And he's more human than troll, you know. He doesn't have quadrants. You're only going to get hurt."

Maliar's mouth tightens. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Feferi may be Maliar's boss, but Eridan is still within two degrees of Feferi and that skirts the line of involvement. Still, inappropriateness has never stopped any quadrant in all the history of trollkind. Feferi can't stop Maliar from feeling. 

She can, however, use it. Not in a bad way, obviously! Maliar is a good employee and trustworthy, and underwent interrogation on Feferi's behalf without cracking. Feferi would have to be a complete idiot to do anything to lose her.

"All right," she says. "Also, which Legislacerators are seconded to the consulate in Chicago?"

Maliar's fingers fly on her tablet. "The Legislacerator in charge is Justcord, and the junior legislacerators are Coldscar and Redglare."

Justcord, from her name, has achieved one of the higher levels within the Legislacerator hierarchy - only Justiciors are permitted to adopt names with _Just_ in them. But the _cord_ , well - probably bloodthirsty, and therefore unlikely to deal kindly with potential jurisdictional wrangling.

Redglare, on the other hand... That's a name Feferi remembers from her history books, a religion she has always skirted without ever joining. She's not sure she wants to believe that the Sufferer was some sort of divine visitation. It would almost distract from his message. But if this Legislacerator has adopted the earlier one's adult name deliberately...

"What's Redglare's history?"

A few more taps. "High honors from training, wrote her thesis on interworld legal tensions with an emphasis on sociological differences underlying the causes of tension, and proposing mutually equally unacceptable solutions to some then-current high-profile cases."

"She speaks English and understands human cultures, then."

"It seems that she is also certified under the American Bar Exam and her classified file alleges that she has a human in her pale quadrant. Unregistered, of course."

How would that be for pain, to want to bear each other's names under the law and to be unable? Of course, without the record in the database linking them Sollux would already have been assassinated, so perhaps her fear is greater than it would be for others.

"Have her assigned to advise Sollux on what to say to these Earth police. I don't want anything untoward coming out."

"You don't worry that it will send a message about your loyalties lying too close to the Signless and that you're gathering supporters?"

Feferi curls her fingers, presses the face of her claws to her lip. "I think," she says, "Eridan will make them more nervous." _I am within the power structure and Eridan isn't, and She has never learned to think like a human. She won't know what to make of him. None of them will._

Maliar opens her mouth, then closes it. "Your Highness," she says, tilting her chin up too high to quite escape sarcasm.

"And make sure Redglare knows the request is from me," Feferi adds. "Now, what is this message I got from Arjand about the ablution traps in Section Bedt?"

 

 

Earth is spacious compared to the Fleet's ships, which although built in space still have inertia and are therefore cramped anyway. This room, with its one-way mirror window and pain-bright light, is almost like home.

"I'm not going to talk to you much," his legal adviser says. "They like to listen to what people being questioned say in relaxed situations. So let's cuddle and tell. I'll go first: if wanting to taste your moirail is too blueblooded to be right I'll ask for hemoreassignment and be wrong forever."

Sollux contemplates this with a sense of dull horror and a lingering knowledge of the hypocrisy of condemning quadrant mixing. "I hear it tastes pretty salty, though why anyone would let your fangs near them is unfathomable."

His legal advisor grins, tongue lolling out from between a set of teeth that would go well on a hand saw. "You're so dumb you don't know how dumb you are," she says cheerfully.

"I already know I'm too dumb to have survived past going shipside and I piled my way into my commission; you don't need to tell me."

She grins. "You're getting the hang of it." She leans in and sniffs him, an unselfconscious full snorting inhale. There might even be a wet throbbing of mucus deep in her sinuses.

Sollux is used to the weird shit Feferi pulls after she goes deep into the ocean, and this is nothing.

"All natural," he says.

"I didn't know you'd be so mustardy," she says contemplatively. "I don't mean that in a hemoist way, because frankly I am the least hemoist Legislacerator in the consulate, but in that you smell like the color yellow and also peppery-ragey and I respect that." She leans back in her chair.

Sollux grinds his teeth in silence. Earth advantage: humans do not give single fucks what color your blood is. He sort of wants to hurt her back for being so cavalier about hemoism, but there's no way to do it without sacrificing his legal counsel, so. So.

Eventually the police come in. They review the facts of his relationship with Eridan: when they met, the duration of the relationship. Did he behave strangely at all.

"Of course he did," Sollux deadpans, "He's a troll with human thought processes and body language." He almost adds, _Seventy-five flavors of fucked up_ , then realizes they wouldn't understand the reference, it being a quotation from the chronicles of the Sufferer not echoed in Earth religious literature1.

“Did he give any indication of having travel plans, or of leaving school?”

Sollux shrugs. “I didn’t ask. He’s human in every way that counts; he wasn’t likely to go to Alternia on a long-term basis. I liked him, but not more than one season’s worth.” He glances over at Redglare, who licks conspiratorially at one of her fangs.

“What do you mean by ‘not more than one season’s worth’?”

“I mean it wasn’t serious.”

Redglare occasionally nods her head, or leans in to speak to him, during the conversation; after the police officers leave, she leans back in her chair. “You’re going to hang,” she says gleefully. 

“What for?”

Redglare snickers. “For being the Disdain’s pretty little nerd-moirail, of course!”

“Says the Legislacerator who took her service name from one who was killed in the line of duty,” Sollux points out, not without reason. He has no service name; bee tech is too new a field for it, and the Apialienators are far less hidebound than the Legislacerators. Once he’s promoted into a position that requires liaising with the older Corps, he might adopt a professional moniker, or maybe not: he’s better known by his private name, given the length of, and number of gossip articles on, his relationship with Feferi. On the other hand, there would definitely be a certain schadenfreude to watching the face of some blueblooded bureaucrat who expected an easily-cowed pissant nerd and instead got Sollux Captor, Diamond Consort-to-be.

Redglare taps at his ankle with her cane. “We share a sign; it’s no secret!” 

Ancestor fetishism is the privilege of the highblooded, who live long enough lives at high enough ranks to achieve fame and notoriety. Sollux’s sign is well-known, of course, by his own merits; and his own Ancestor’s story is held under classification, like so many people’s. He once tried to hack the system, but every directory of progress he made closed around him, folders there one moment and hidden the next. It was like someone had been watching him access the files, and was closing some and not others, and not letting him access the parts he wanted. He had quit as soon as he was certain, and then had spent the following week jumping at every footstep on the hivestem stairs, every time the elevator on his floor dinged, expecting to be taken from his hive in the middle of the day. To be culled for unauthorized file access attempts, or pre-recruited for his budding skills.

“That’s honorable,” he says, to fill the space. If she can hear the undercurrent of sarcasm, she doesn’t remark on it.

 

 

The little escape pod crash-lands in the sea not far from where the replica ship is built into the island. Eridan expects it to sink, but it floats instead. He gets out and swims to the ship, which is deserted.

There’s still a little food in the ship that hasn’t gone bad – mostly canned goods and what are probably emergency rations – and he sleeps in the bed that day, since all that swimming wore him out.

Then he gets to exploring.

He starts with the guards’ quarters, opening the doors, opening the closets. Trying to find the gate, because there must be one, and it is going to have to be attached to some fairly heavy-duty machinery: massive batteries or generators, and the computer systems, and stabilizers. Most of the hold, most likely.

He goes down into the ship.

Most of the doors are unlocked now; Feferi’s people must have searched everything. So he goes through each of them. The door at the other end of the hall from the room he slept in contains some sort of machine, with a computer as the interface; when he hits the power button, it boots up onto some sort of menu that’s in Alternian.

He hits “enter,” and then a couple more times. The machine starts whirring quietly, and then a door in the side opens, and out rolls an apple.

He eats it. It tastes like a real apple. He’s never seen a nanoprinter before, because they’re too expensive even for major universities in the US, and even in Alternia they’re not very common. That there’s a nanoprinter on the ship is…discomfiting. That Feferi either didn’t discover it, didn’t know what it was, or didn’t care to use it, is even more discomfiting.

The room next door is full of tubes and machinery, cables everywhere, all of it quiescent. There’s a sliding door in the middle of the room, like an elevator. The labels are written in both English and in Alternian.

Eridan doesn’t touch the dials. He needs to think.

There is no place safe for him. He’s not even sure he’s safe here.

He couldn’t have stayed with Feferi; being hunted, he would have been found there, and would have brought Feferi – and by extension Sollux – into ruin. And he certainly can’t go back now, with the escape pod crash-landed in the ocean. It’s not meant for round trips.

Assuming that he can set the gate’s target coordinates, he can’t stay in Alternia, because he doesn’t speak the language and his blood color is immediately recognizeable. He’d be found very quickly, or killed even faster.

On Earth…the other end of this gate is probably set to someplace in Chicago, the place he came from. Obviously he doesn’t want to go there: there may be accomplices hiding there. But he also doesn’t want to go to the consulate in Chicago, because that's still Alternian territory. He needs…

If only he knew the coordinates for the U.S. embassy in Alternia, he could go there for asylum. But of course they wouldn’t let just anyone in; it wouldn’t be secure. He needs an unsecured gate, or a way to present credentials.

His hand goes to his back pocket. The one with his wallet, where ever since he was thirteen and started going places without his parents he’s carried a photocopy of his American passport, to prove his citizenship, because so few people would believe it.

He wants to make sure there aren’t any unpleasant surprises lurking in the ship first, though. Assuming that he can even get English instructions for the thing.

After exploring the rest of the ship, he determines that not only does he need to figure out some way of operating the nanoprinter to get him something to eat – the alternative being catching some fish, MacGyvering up some way of cleaning them when he’s never done it before in his life, and roasting them on deck, eww, no – so he futzes around with the nanoprinter a while and manages to put together what seems to be uncooked rice and some variety of meat that smells sort of like beef. Maybe. Possibly goat. He thinks. Probably not something that makes him a cannibal, anyway, though.

He boils the rice in a pan in the kitchen and sautés the meat. Eats it, watching the stars twinkle faintly up in the sky, and then goes back down to the gate interface.

It does come in English. He explores the coordinate log, some of which are labeled and some of which aren’t. He has no idea.

If he’s going to get out of here, he needs coordinates. And if he’s gone by the time his captors or anyone else get here, then it won’t matter if he used the internet. Even if he gives his location away. And if the American embassy gives him up, he has far bigger problems than being tracked on this computer.

He goes and boots up the computer. Looks up the gate coordinates for the embassy, and then goes down the hallway. Realizes he’s forgotten a few digits. It takes a couple of trips to type them all in. Hits “call.”

 

 

Feferi calls the Alternian consulate in Chicago, because Sollux was summoned more than a day ago and any proper Altrnian legal proceeding would have notified the moirail by now. Just because she's the one who made sure Redglare was put with him doesn't mean she's not upset, even if she doesn't think she has reason to worry.

After a depressing dialing menu, she finally reaches a real person and says, "I'm calling about my moirail; he's in the Apialienators and a flushed ex of his disappeared, and he was called in for questioning by Chicago PD."

There's a pause, and then, yet another level up of polite, "Would your moirail happen to be Carminelieutenderizer Sollux Captor?"

"Yes!"

"Your Disdain, thank you for calling. We're currently in correcpondence with Chicago PD to release Carminelieutenderizer Captor, as he is not being charged with any crime, nor do they have any reason to believe that he is responsible for his former matesprit's disappearance."

"I should _hope_ not," she says, making it tart, "Considering Sollux was with me when the ex disappeared."

It's not true, but more interestingly, it's verifiably untrue - Sollux was on-duty at the time, and he serves on a different ship. If that doesn't start rumors that make Her nervous, Feferi will eat her own cuttlefish. "Well, I want to be kept informed. What's your name, rank, and hemocaste?"

A swallow. "Silind Yirroi, Propadoppelgandist First Class, Olive blood. Your Disdain."

"Nice to meet you! Now, since my moirail is super-important to me and I love him and would like to be with him as long as he lives, I was hoping you could lean on the police a little? And let me know every so often - maybe once every shift? - if there's been any change."

"Yes, Your Disdain. Absolutely."

"Thank you, Silind! My personal Propadoppelgandist's number is in the network, so you can call her instead, but please do let one of us know what's happening!" She hangs up and gets out of her desk chair. That wasn't very nice of her, but it was necessary, both politically and, well, she does worry when he's out of her jurisdiction. 

Besides, any Propadoppelgandist who wanted to escape culling would already be thinking about how to ingratiate themselves with her, so she doesn't feel quite so bad as all that. Maliar's loyal, but not all of them support Feferi's cause.

Maliar, when Feferi emerges from her office, is pale-faced, eyes fixed on her display.

"He went to the American embassy," Maliar says, "And they notified Chicago PD via an unencrypted channel."

Feferi doesn't laugh with relief - _boys_ \- out of respect for Maliar's feelings, but she _is_ smiling as she leans over Maliar's shoulder to read the transmission.

She puts a hand on Maliar's shoulder, which is almost imappropriately pale workplace conduct, but they are close, she and Maliar, so it's not unusual between them. "They're his people; they'll look after him," Feferi says.

"They have to know that if they send the message out unencrypted, it will be picked up by the Condesce's people, at the very least, and the people who kidnapped him, at worst."

"Yes," Feferi murmurs, "but so do we. And so does the United States government, of which he is a citizen. If they try anything, it will be masked in law, and the first step will by necessity known - either because they do it in public, or because one of the other camps will make it so. Don't worry!"

Maliar puts her hands on the table, her crabbed hands unable to flatten on its surface. "I wish I had your faith," she says.

 

The officers questioning him - for the fourth time; Redglare says they haven't got any ground to stand on but are hoping he cracks and confesses to something so they can clear things up easy, what with how Feferi will step in and make sure he doesn't actually serve time, though Sollux has his doubts and suspects it's just old-fashioned speciesism - are interrupted by another officer coming into the room, beckoning them out into the hall.

Redglare leans back in her chair, stretching. "Don't worry, bee-boy; that's the smell of new information pertaining to the case." She sniffs heavily. "I love frustration. It's like mint."

If he never has to hear her snuffling the words on paperwork, or the emotions of her conversation partners, ever again, it will be too soon. Though it's sort of compelling, in a darkish sort of way, and Corps gossip has that Legislacerators are damn good in the concupiscent quadrants.

He massages near the base of his horns - getting a headache - and says nothing.

The cops come back in, frowning. "We've just heard from the American embassy that your notorious ex has walked into it and says that he's been the victim of a kidnapping, but not by you."

"So if the timelines agree and the victim agrees that my client isn't at fault," Redglare says, "I take it he can go?"

"Yeah," says the cop, brushing a stray curl of hair out of her eyes. "Yeah, you can go. Thank you for your cooperation."

"Much obliged." Redglare sticks out a hand. "I look forward to working with you again soon, Officer Boateng."

"Likewise," Boateng says, shaking her hand and flashing a smile that is very definitely not platonically tinged. So much for that, then.

Outside the police station, on their way to the Alternian embassy, Redglare says, "Watch your pretty human boytoy. He's as purple as the call I got enlisting my services implied, and this is going to be worse than you think." She licks her lips. "If your diamond-friend can get you off-duty and close to her, you might be better off. If we're talking fish, and we both know we are, they're not likely to care much about the state the pretty little goldie is returned to his diamond-friend in, because she's cyan enough that it's hardly stealing anything from her, proportionally speaking."

"No, that hadn't occurred to me at all," Sollux spits out, "like it never occurs to me to ask people if they've put their hives through a day cycle and seen if it fixes their problems."

Her tongue flicks at the air. "All due respect," she says quietly, "but you're not the only one who has something to lose here. I'll do what I can." She tilts her head up, towards the Earth sun, and Sollux remembers that she's blind beneath those red glasses, that looking up at Earth's sun can't hurt her any more than she's already been hurt. "I'll do what I can for her."

He licks his lips. Not _Her_ , the Condesce's pronoun, but _her_ , two steps up. "Long live the Disdain." 

She covers his mouth with one finger. "Hail to the Empire, subjugator of worlds. Now go to your moirail and get out of the way of the fish before you get harpooned. Don't _argue_ with me."

He closes his mouth and follows after her towards the Alternian consulate.

 

1 Suits 1243:1665: “That,” saith the Sufferer, “is seventy-five flavors of fucked-up.” The original sermon from which this phrase derives has been partially reconstructed from concurrent accounts, and is reproduced below: 

1665 “Seventy-five flavors of fucked-up, if by “fucked-up” you are willing to accept the concept of a society’s right to judge the appropriateness of actions or thought processes held by individuals, and also understanding that the association of ‘fucking’, i.e. sexual congress, and undesirability, is a false connection entirely, excluding those persons who do not seek sexual activity, although that is not to say that they all disapprove of all sexual activity, merely that they do not wish to engage in any. 1666. And of course the choice of the number ‘seventy-five’ is entirely incidental to the entire process, and was, if you will, chosen at random to give an indication of a large but finite number of aspects of the relationship by which the participants in that relationship may be concerned, although to say that multiple individuals in a given situation are experiencing the same thing is not necessarily true nor even necessarily should be true. 1667. In conclusion, this entire phrase is offensively fallacious and what I meant to say was rather that the individuals in the described situation found it troubling for more than one reason each, and that their own internal judgement that the situation was troubling is what leads me to describe it as ‘fucked-up,’ albeit with the above reservations regarding the use of the word ‘fucked.’”


	4. part ٤

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reward for the patience of those who've been waiting for part 3 for so long.
> 
> The part number here is not a backwards 3! It is the [Eastern Arabic numeral](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals) representing 4. If it shows up as a sad box for you, your computer or browser does not display Arabic. and you should take a look at the linked Wikipedia page.

Eridan Ampora, as his documents read, has been in the American embassy for two nights by the time Terezi reaches him, and she doesn't like that. Who knows what stupidity he's let slip? Besides, at least one of the people on the American embassy staff are color-close to bluebloods Terezi knows are for the Condesce, and if She isn't paying attention Terezi will eat her own noose.

She'd have to be insane to not be paying attention. Which, Terezi will grant that She is any number of things – ruthless beyond wisdom, older than the Empire, beautiful as a warp-starred sky – but She isn't that. 

Ampora is sitting pretty in a back room of the embassy – he's probably been sleeping in one of the chairs – when she arrives and sits down with him.

"First of all," she says, "I'm not your legal advisor in any real sense. I'm only a Legislacerator by training and by title; I'm detached from the Legislacerator Corps because I'm also certified to practice law in the United States. I answer to the American Bar Association for my credentials and to the Legislacerator Corps Justiciors for my paycheck, and I am the least biased counsel you're going to get."

He smells of nerves and dubiousness. "Why do I need an Alternian legal counsel?"

She grins. "Because if the Condesce, long has She reigned and long will She reign, hears about you, you're by blood color and the fact that you're breathing, in the succession." 

He doesn't seem surprised. Good. Someone's been at him, then – probably the two-toned bee-boy, and if that's not a current relationship, given the way Captor smelled like ozone and sex and lying most of the way through the questioning, she's going blind in the nose.

"I want out of the succession," he says. 

"Then stop breathing."

"Has anyone ever told you your society is nuts?"

"Larva, grub, snack."

"What?"

"The larva calling the grub a snack. It's – "

"No, I think I got it," he says, and sighs. "So I'm in the succession."

"Yep."

"What should I expect out of that?"

She shrugs. Politics aren't really her thing, though everyone has a preference between the Heiress - who's a pretty slick piece of work, if Terezi says so herself, and a little more softhearted than even Terezi might like her ruler to be - and the Condesce. It's not inevitable that the Disdain will succeed, this cycle, or even in Terezi's lifetime. Bluebloods think time differently than greenies and rusts.

"A lot of assassination attempts, people trying to control you, and probably your loved ones being used as leverage against you."

His jaw tightens. "The trying to control me thing already happened once."

"Three times, actually. Once when you were fostered out, once when you were kidnapped, and if you think your pretty little nerdfriend's diamond-love isn't thinking how to turn you to her advantage, you're lying to yourself."

His mouth twists. "And you?"

She grins. "My only interest is justice. I have enough from you, along with ship records and the help of some Financiavengers, to haul in certain briny parties for questioning on charges of treason and conspiracy to commit kidnapping, and you bet your horns if I have them, they'll be talking. It'll take a few perigees to go before a Subjugglator, even with the connections I have, so you should sit tight in the embassy until then."

"Are you serious?" He's nearly shrieking.

"Yes. Well, you could go back to Earth and go into protective custody, which would be essentially equivalent, but that would be a diplomatic daymare for everyone involved, seeing as how that would mean a potential heir to the Empire was in American hands in an unknown location."

He breathes deeply, once, then twice. "I see."

"In the meantime, I'm going to go after the nice fishies who kidnapped you. Don't leave the embassy for any reason, including the death of a relative, without seeing me in person first. Being with Carminelieutenderizer Captor isn't good enough. Don't leave, even if the embassy staff tell you to." 

He nods, still pale. "And food, showers, the like?"

"The embassy should have them supplied. Don't worry about that."

"I'll try," he says wryly.

"It's not worth it." She flips the cover on her tablet closed. "You have much bigger things to worry about."

 

 

Sollux comes back to her sleep-deprived - they kept the interrogation room brightly-lit the whole time they were talking to him, and the rest of the time the room was moon-dark - blood-shaded circles under his eyes and his hands shaking.

"Hi," is the first thing he says to her, clasped hard in her arms, his ribs jutting out beneath her hands. She brushes her horns against his, a fond gentle knock, and then rests her head on his shoulder, glad of his warmth. "Thanks for sending the legislacerator; she kept things together."

"Good." He smells like ozone from the world gate and his own powers, and she wants to dunk him in sopor and pull the recuperacoon lid shut over both of them.

"They found Eridan. He's at the US embassy. It's why they let me go, I think."

"I also leaned on the Alternian diplomatic corps."

He grins against the back of her head. "Have I mentioned you're the best moray-eel ever?"

She wriggles closer, or tries, anyway. "I love it when you pun."

 

 

It's easy enough to go through the US Fleet embassy's gate records for the coordinates Eridan came from, so Terezi goes from there to the ship where Eridan said he was being held. She doubts she'll find anything of interest – since "he managed to get away", ha, that was a lie, something happened – his minders are probably long gone, and all signs of them cleaned up.

That's…not quite how it is. It's like they picked up and left without expecting to ever come back, but without needing to hide their traces. 

She drags her fingertips over the stove in the guards' quarters, disconcerted. Something in his story doesn't add up. 

She goes down into the ship again, looking for some sort of security setup. If there are cameras of any sort, they might have recorded –

There's a sea-breeze where there shouldn't be one. She taps at the floor with her cane, walking along, and hears the tinkling of broken glass. Takes a deep breath. Finds the wall, runs her hand along it until she feels the edge of a porthole, and – 

Like she thought. She licks the blood off the cut on her finger. Broken window. Drags her cane along the rest of the wall, barking her shins on a side table, and finds that every one of the windows was broken. Something happened, but she doesn't smell blood. Just sea air and the damp.

If someone was in here recently, it would smell like them still. Eridan's only been gone from the ship for a little over two days. That's not long enough for the smell of them to fade completely. He's lying, somehow. Somewhere, his story isn't right.

Searching the blocks one by one is time-consuming, but worth it when she finds one that smells like sopor, opens up the recuperacoon, and nearly falls over from the heady mix of seadweller-brine, tyrian purple, ozone, gold blood, and the lingering musk of pale pheromones. 

"Carminelieutenderizer Captor," she says, mostly to herself and very sweetly, "I'm going to string you up by your chitinous windhole, and while I'm at it I might have to ask that pretty moirail of yours some questions, too."

Somewhere between five and ten blocks later, she smells the thrum of oil and electricity and steel, some sort of highpowered machinery that isn't the engine. She taps around the room, and as she gets closer to the device, she can smell something a little like yeast and sugar and burnt rubber. 

The display reads, in Braille for humans, _HP Nanolayer 1025_ , which is only the same nanoprinter that's used for the trial-grade nooses, as well as certain types of fetish gear. She knows this technobeast, and pats it fondly on the frame.

Flipping through the menus, she sees several items - food, recently, that would be Eridan, and before that some weapons, then clothes and some drugs and a lightbulb, hmm, and then - a nonstandard object. It had to be plugged in from external designs. 

The specs were deleted later, which takes some effort. Nanoprinters aren't supposed to do that, to keep from printing money, or other things that forgers might want. But what could it have been? 

She goes back through things. The respiteblock, the empty rooms, the kitchen, the guards' chambers that don't smell quite right. She runs back over Ampora's testimony: regular meals, day-cycle sleep, swimming, enforced digital silence, weapons training. 

He's too human to carry his own signature weapons. Academics often don't even have any at all.

She traces a hand along the wall. A small weapons rack, for - yes, that's a scimitar, which fits the description he gave of the weapons trainer, Kolzea. The Cavalquistadores, the elite arm of the Cavalreapers, favor scimitars, but are trained in combat on foot as well. It would fit, and Ampora hadn't been able to describe her sign and hemochrome well enough to actually identify her, especially as the name _Kolzea_ was inordinately popular in the clutches hatched one hundred sweeps ago, give or take ten.

She reaches the last row of weapons on the rack, and feels - oh, hello. A sniff. Bright metal, something maybe with copper in to give it a warm sheen, but not sharp here. She picks it up, feels its weight in her hand. Long, well-balanced, maybe a staff? 

The end is - well. A double-headed trident. That would definitely be something to wipe from a nanoprinter's records, seeing as its use is a crime to those without tyrian blood.

Well, well. She puts it back, takes a photo, and then goes looking for the data grub that would have held its nanoprinter design.

 

Maliar's console chimes with the gentle ring of an incoming Imperial contact. She dives to answer it.

"Office of Her Imperial Disdain," she says coolly.

"This is Propadoppelgandist General Aptthink, on behalf of the Imperial offices. If the Disdain is present, transfer to her; if not, we expect her to return our call within one shipnight."

Maliar nods. "I will see if she is at her desk, sir."

Feferi, who had been out of sight on the other side of the desk, turns on her own display, fluffs her hair, adjusts her earrings, and accepts the call.

"My darling Descendant," the Condesce purrs. "It's been too long since we talked."

"Your Imperial Condescension," Fereri says, bowing to the screen. "To what do I roe Your attention?" A thin pun, but aggressive to be the first to make one.

"Tellin' you to watch your gills. I hear there's a few other highbloods who found a tyrian on Earth, and they thought they'd put him in our place." She grins, licks her lips. "Shore be a shame if you got krilled and left him as the Disdain. You're a sucker, but you're not human."

Feferi bows her head. "I apprectiate your concern."

The Condesce waves a hand, langorous, her heavy weight bouyed by the water and her hair a net tangling around a myriad of wires and her own limbs. "Just me being a reel good Ancestor. Give your pretty warm pale-frond for me when he gets back and let him know I'll take care of the traitors." She signs off, and Feferi breathes out.

"Maliar," she says, when she has breath again, "Call Redglare and tell her that the Condesce is moving to interfere in her investigation."

"On it," Maliar says, and Feferi lets the sound of Maliar's conversation wash over her as she leans back in her chair and breathes.

 

Less than two hours later, the interweb is bursting with footage of the first of the three cullings that Terezi expects. She's at the American embassy, fresh from a meeting with the Disdain, and she is, for lack of a better phrase, 8xtr8mely ann8yed!!!!!!!! This is going to do terrible things to her case record, to start with, and it's patently unjust not to give them an opportunity to be heard in court, their crimes properly investigated.

The Condesce's double-trident is a flash of gold in the water, as Glassfin brings his staff up, and then he's staggering backwards, purple blood oozing out from around the tines in his thorax. She swims forward, rips it out, grabs his horns and grabs them to hold him still, and slits his throat with a casual flick of her trident's blade-tips.

It's cleanly done, and she turns away from him, not even breathing hard. Beautiful, dappled dark skin and the bright stripes of her sign worked into her clothes, tinted violet by Glassfin's blood.

"Thus always to traitors," she sings out, the ceremonial end to all cullings for treason, and the footage ends.

When Terezi looks to the side at Ampora, he's just taking his hands off his eyes.

"I didn't want to see that," he says, face pale.

"You're a wimp," Terezi informs him, "and very lucky you were raised on Earth. Most seadweller grubs go through a genocidal phase around six or eight sweeps."

His jaw tightens, then he says, slowly, "I take a number of medications in inadvisably extreme doses to control my interent violent tendencies. I have a conscience."

"You should get off them; it will make you more likely to survive this whole thing."

"Yeah," he says, looking away, "you're probably right." He licks his lips. "You - have quadrant partners?"

"I'm alive, aren't I?" she deflects, thinking of pale limbs and a broad jaw, her all-but-moirail who speaks hoarse-voiced about taxidermy and whose hair curls wiry against her fingers, and who can hardly see any better than she can.

"If you thought you might kill them without realizing what you were doing..."

"I'd make sure I realized." It's that simple.

"You have fuck-awful ideas about mental health," he snaps, then breathes in and out a few times. 

When he looks moderately calm again, she says, "Was there a data grub in the ship that they showed you?"

"They didn't show it to me. I took it because it was left in my room."

Sigh. Sollux or someone needs to tell him to stop speaking like a fish if he wants to be credibly humble and without ambitions towards the throne.

"Give it to me."

"Why?"

"Because it's evidence, and if you don't you're interfering with my investigation, which is actually a crime on both sides of the Warp."

He hands it over. She can't smell the contents of a drive, unfortunately, so she'll have to plug it into a computer before she can determine what's on it.

"Are you in contact with Sollux?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because I want to talk to him, maybe? Because we went on a couple of dates, and after that I got kidnapped, and I kind of want to make sure he's not getting in trouble because of me when it's not his fault."

"How do you know it's not his fault?"

"I – " He goes quiet. "Because he didn't talk like he wanted me to rule the Alternian Empire."

"People lie all the time. Sometimes they hurt you even when you know the truth," she says, thinking of a friend with eight pupils and a smile so sharp it could cut you just looking at it. "I'll tell him you wanted to talk."

 

Sollux gets called out of an intense coding session by a call from Redglare, who grins at him too-wide and says, "Message for you from your pretty purple flushfriend!"

"Fuck off."

"Don't be like that. I'm actually his counsel, and I need to talk to you. And maybe a certain quadrant of yours, if she's around, because I need answers."

"No, you don't."

"Carminelieutenderizer Captor. I am legally empowered to detain you until you talk to me and give me answers to the best of your knowledge and to my satisfaction. We can either do that in a place of your choosing, or of mine. I'd prefer to do it in yours, because that's the easy way, and it means you're cooperating, and I won't have the Disdain knocking down my door and demanding my demotion."

Right. Fine. "If you called me you know where I am. I'll see if her schedule can be cleared – I assume you'll want to talk to us separately."

"Well, yes."

"I'll talk to you when you get here." He signs off and goes to find Feferi, who's playing with her tank of cuttlefish while her assistant handles some of her mail.

"Redglare's coming here." 

"Oh, good!" Feferi offers him one of the cuttlefish. It's currently grey and gold, trying to match her skin and bracelets and not succeeding very well. "Would you like to pet it?"

"No, thanks."

She shrugs and lets it swim away within the tank.

"Why are you glad Redglare's coming here?"

"Because she's supposed to be very good at her job, and I'd rather have her on our side than against us."

"Legislacerators can't be bought."

"Don't be ridiculous, of course they can. Maybe she can't, but, well, the truth favors us, so."

"I want Maliar in the room when you talk to her."

"Shore thing," she chirps, and kisses his cheek. Sollux feels a little like he's been lovingly outmaneuvered, so he goes to grind levels in _Dayworlds_.

 

The Disdain sits down at the table across from Terezi and they both grin at each other.

"All right, cards on the table. You were on that boat at least once, as was Carminelieutenderizer Captor – there's pheromonal evidence on the ship, in one of the recuperacoons. I took multisensory tape and hemoanalyzing to it, so I'm certain."

The Disdain grins, all her teeth showing. "You tell me what that means, Legislacerator."

"It puts you at the scene of the crime pretty definitively, which seems to me to imply that either you and yours were holding Eridan and the team holding him are totally made up, or you're the reason he isn't still there with the Cavalquistador and the two others."

"If you're asking me, you already know that they're real. Don't fish."

Terezi raises her eyebrows. "It would be cool of you to let me know what happened to the team holding him, seeing as their testimony would sure mean a lot in this kidnapping case. Even their corpses, if you culled them."

The Disdain brushes a hand over the row of bangles at one wrist. "They cooperated, so I let them live."

"Are you going to give them up to my protective custody?"

"I don't see why I should! After all, Glassfin was already culled. If I tell you where they are, how do I know someone else won't find them first, and cull them for conspiracy towards treason against the Condesce – long may She reign."

"Yes, I can see why that might be a problem." Terezi considers. "You do, however, acknowledge that you know where they are."

"Of course."

"If they're American citizens," Terezi suggests, "They would probably very much appreciate my assistance in helping them escape – as political refugees, you understand – for being supporters, however militant, of the incoming ruler of the Alternian Empire. Assuming that that incoming ruler is successful in her bid for the throne."

The Disdain laughs. "That sounds awfully convoluted! Besides, I don't want the throne. It's too much fun being with my cuttlefish and my pretty moirail – you've seen him, you know how good he is, and he's a terror in the pile – so I just support him in his career and his ambitions, and I'll enjoy things as they are for now."

A lie, finally. Terezi can smell it. "Your Disdain."

"Yes?"

"I'm trying to help you."

"I don't really see how that's true."

"Without the testimony of those guards, I have circumstantial evidence that places you at the head of the plot to put Eridan in the role of Disdain or Condesce, which puts you right at the end of Her trident's tines. I wouldn't prosecute it – it would be career suicide – but someone higher up in the Legislacerator Corps could and would. Someone loyal to Her, who doesn't believe you when you say that you prefer to stay home and support your moirail's career."

"Oh, goodness." The Disdain covers her mouth, clearly feigning shock, but it's a smile under there and they both know it. "I'm so sorry, I didn't realize. Could you please turn off your tape?"

"I'm legally required to tape all conversations I have with potential witnesses in a case I'm investigating."

"Oh, well, then I guess this is over," she says, and puts a device on the table, and presses a button.

"That's something a few friends of mine cooked up," she says, leaning back, "and it'll block your recorder as long as it's on." She nods faintly. "Let's talk. You want your case. I don't care about the case – She'll take care of the traitors for me. I want to end the hydroarchy, at least on paper, and to do that I need to destroy Her and all those loyal to her."

"That's going to mean some pretty serious culling."

"Yes." She doesn't smile. "I'm looking for every ally I can get, and Eridan will help me find the ones I have. Are you with me?"

"Yes," Terezi says, no question. Better this than the one already there, who clearly prefers the laws of two thousand years ago when all the trolls with blood in the greens or warmer were serfs. Better this than Eridan, hopelessly human and likely to be dead within a day, and if not easily manipulated through his unfamiliarity with Alternian customs.

"Thank you." The Disdain sighs, clearly relieved. "Now that that's over, I need your help."

 

Eridan's given space in some sort of small closet in the back of the embassy that contains a bed, a dresser, a desk, and a little room off the side with a toilet and shower. It reminds him of the time he and his parents stayed in a hotel room in Tokyo while on vacation one year, only here he can wear shoes. Not like there's much of a place to put them, mind you, but he could.

Redglare comes back after a couple of days and says, "Well, the Condesce is trying to get at you."

"That's not reassuring." 

"She's claiming that you're an Alternian citizen by blood, and that your adoption isn't listed on any official registries, so you must've been stolen and your parents are guilty of trafficking."

His whole body goes cold. "No. My parents wouldn't do that." 

"Of course it's bullshit." She grins, licks at her cherry lollipop again, "but she wants you. Needs to firm up her base of support after culling those three who were holding you. She can't know who tacitly supported them, and making a show of her power by offing the surprise heir sounds like a good plan." 

"I don't want the throne." 

"There's no way you can say that that she'll believe." Redglare shrugs. "Especially since they gave you training in how to use the Imperial Trident as a weapon. They wanted you as a new heir."

"I'm not any good at it, though."

"Makes it easier to kill you." She offers him a fresh lollipop. It's blue.

"How do I get out of this alive? That's the goal, isn't it?"

"Not realistically." She crunches down on the lollipop. "You could probably definitely outwait her, as long as she respects embassies' sovereignty."

He gets up from his chair in the conference room and goes to lean his forehead against the wall. "I want a life. On Earth, where I belong. How do I make that happen?"

She laughs. It's very harsh. "Now we're talking."


	5. part ٥

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The part number here is the [Eastern Arabic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals) numeral representing 5. If it shows up as a sad box for you, your computer or browser does not display Arabic, and you should take a look at the linked Wikipedia page.
> 
> Also, I'm gonna say it now: the ending may make you think there will be a sequel. This is misleading. I wrote the ending after finishing a nearly-50K-word fic for the Marvel movies. It's in that style, but there is no sequel, nor will there be one (unless someone is sufficiently inspired to write that fic, in which case, go for it).

The announcement continues, "My designated heir has made gestures to take the throne before the weakness of age has come upon me, and so, a challenge." Her eyes are vividly fuchsia, Her smile full of teeth. "I will not tolerate her accepting the fruit of treachery, as we know that there are connections between her to the traitors' captive, himself a potential heir to my throne. It was cleverly done, but the time has come to bring her to face her deeds." 

"Well," Feferi sighs, I guess it's time. Make sure Redglare's seen this, will you, Maliar?"

"Of course." Maliar pulls up the relevant secure channels.

 

 

Sollux doesn't know it's happening until Maliar sends him a note that says _It's being televised._ It's not that he didn't know Feferi was gonna challenge Her, or more accurately, that She'd challenged Feferi, but that he thinks this one was forced up in timing. That this is closer to an assassination.

Why didn't she bring him? He could've helped. Used his powers.

He knows why. She doesn't want him in the helm. If she survives – he swallows, feeling sick – it wouldn't do her any good to have him in the helm, and if she doesn't, well. He'll be going after anyway, as her moirail. Better death than that.

They are standing there, at other ends of a crowd full of seadweller officers. Feferi got in by pretending to be one of them, probably; she's wearing a uniform, and there's a shirt floating nearby that was probably hiding her sign, or offering a different one to disguise her.

The Condesce is beautiful, dangerous, terrifying. Feferi looks like power and grace. He bites through his lip.

"I challenge you in answer to your challenge," Feferi says, bright and clear, despite the distance she probably is from the microphone the Propadoppelgandist is using to catch it. "For all of Alternia." 

"Gladly," the Condesce says, and then there's a noise, loud, a bright light that fuzzes the screen.

By the time it clears, there's chaos, and the Condesce is clearly so much meat. It's not pretty.

Feferi didn't do it. 

There's chaos. Feferi holds up the trident. "Come here, usurper," she says, louder, voice low, and that's Eridan, coming toward her, kneeling at her feet, setting the Crosshairs down on the floor out of reach.

"I cede my victory to You," he says, in Alternian, heavy-accented, and she puts a hand on his head.

Tears his fucking horns off, while he screams, bleeds.

Sollux is too sick to do anything like make noise. Keeps his eyes closed, holding everything in. He doesn't know if he feels worse because of what his moirail is doing, or because she's doing it to his matesprit.

It doesn't matter, anyway. There's nothing he can do about it.

 

 

Maliar collects Sollux – he's due for a promotion or five, since he's now the Diamond Consort of the sitting Condesce – from the airlock and escorts him to Feferi's office. He's not very talkative, not that he should be, given what he saw.

"Hi," Feferi says, when the door opens. Maliar gets to watch Sollux nearly fall into a chair at the bright openness of her gaze, at Eridan bandaged, hornless until they grow back, but alive beside her.

"How'd you do that." His voice is flat. 

Feferi sighs. "It's not that hard to do it so that you leave the nerves and roots intact. I made sure of it. They'll grow back in a few sweeps." Not that it wasn't painful. Maliar can guess what it was like, and she aches a little with wanting to make it hurt less. Not that she could.

"And until then I get pretty close to anonymity," Eridan agrees smugly, which is charming, because a day ago he was on too many painkillers to think clearly. He was asking about salted meat rations, and also Torrent clients.

"Okay." Sollux looks at Feferi, that deep searching glance of relief that calls for a good pile session. "Okay." 

 

 

"I'm still angry with you," he says into her hair, as she strokes his back.

"I know." 

"I might always be." 

"Okay." He's so warm.

 

 

Eridan kisses Sollux at the gate back to school, back to home. Eridan's horns are starting to grow back, but his head still feels light, and he's not sure what will have happened to his stuff in the meantime, left in the apartment for all those months. He hopes the school accepts "kidnapped and dragged into xenopolitical drama" as a good excuse. It'll work out somehow.

He doesn't look back, if only because he knows Sollux has his email, and they'll be in touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _(part 6)_
> 
>  
> 
> "I'm telling you," Karkat says, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets as they walk into the theater parking lot, "that movie was a blatant piece of propagandist bullshit."
> 
> "Yeah, okay," John agrees, grinning, and gives Karkat a noogie. "Interesting how they said that the extra seadweller heir had been adopted out to Earth to protect him from culling." He glances over at Karkat, who swallows.
> 
> "Yeah," he agrees, staring fixedly at the parking lot asphalt. "Interesting."


End file.
